[]Colinvaux begins by setting up two basic central concepts for the study of any organism, including people:
niche and
breeding strategy.
As Colinvaux describes it, a
niche is the way an animal makes its
living. The niche of a panda is eating shoots and leaves. The niche of a
koala is eating Eucalyptus leaves. The niche of the lion is to hunt and
eat large herbivores. The niche of the ruminant is to graze on grass.
The niche of birds is to eat insects. And so on.
The
breeding strategy is dependent upon the niche. Each animal has far more offspring than are necessary for reproduction. As Colinvaux puts it,
each animal has the number of children they think they can afford.
Since there is no coordination across members of a species, each
individual produces the optimal number of offspring that would ensure
their genetic material is passed forward into the next generation in a
sort of arms race. Thus there are always more offspring than are needed
to replace the parents.
This means producing offspring well in excess of the resources available
for that niche, leading to competition for the available niche space
where those most able to get sustenance from their environment are the
ones able to survive and reproduce. Sometimes mutations occur which give
certain members of the species an advantage, a process known as
natural selection. It should be noted that this process has no end goal or direction.
In any case, the competition is done by nature itself, which winnows down the excess offspring to suit the available niche.
The niche itself, however, remains a fixed size.
Producing more offspring has no effect on the size of the niche. When an
animal lives in a fixed niche its population is fixed as well, no
matter how vigorously the animal breeds."
(p.53) "Each individual is progammed (sic) to thrust as many descendants
as possible into the next generation, and it competition for niche
space that winnows the surplus. (p. 52)
Some animals have a breeding strategy to produce large numbers of
offspring, knowing that most will not survive (of course, they do not
literally
know this). Other animals produce fewer offspring but
invest much more time and resources in raising them. Animals lower down
the food chain need to produce a large amount of offspring; a "gambler"
strategy where most offspring will end up feeding predators higher up
the food chain, while animals higher up the food chain must necessarily
produce fewer offspring.
The breeding strategy is set by the niche. These are two interlocked concepts. Each animal breeds in line with its niche.
An animal's breeding strategy is designed to thrust enough offspring
into the next generation to be able to compete for the available slots,
but not so many that the survival of the entire brood is threatened in
the current generation. Thus, there is a sort of "Goldilocks" strategy
that evolves over time based upon the niche that the animal occupies.
Too
few offspring and you will not secure a place in the next generation. Too
many, and your children will not have enough current resources, also ensuring failure:
Having a few large young, and looking after them, is the best way to
press your descendants into the populations of the future...But even for
those animals with the prudent banking habits of the large-young
gambit, there must still be a pressure to raise the greatest possible
number of babies, producing a tendency to make the modest family hold
just one youngster more. The tendency is blocked or balanced by the
danger that lies in trying for too large a family. If a couple tries for
one youngster too many there may not be enough food to go round and the
whole brood may be in jeopardy. One youngster too few, and your
neighbors' descendants will swamp yours. One youngster too many, and you
tend to lose whole line that wins will be the one which starts with
exactly the right family size: the largest number of babies that can be
reared on the food available, and not one baby more. There will,
therefore, be an optimum family size for any species using the
large-young gambit, and habits which result in this optimum family will
be preserved by natural selection.
The human breeding strategy, then, is based on sexual habits that lead
to a surplus of babies, balanced by patterns of behavior that reduce or
halt this continued accretion by culling. The methods of culling are
either deliberate (infanticide) or properties of social behavior
(taboos) that probably serve a number of other functions as well. But,
whether by infanticide or learned taboo, these methods of stemming the
flood of babies to what is convenient all result from the use of
intelligence. It is the purely human quality of a developed intelligence
that allows our curious sexual appetite to be a useful part of our
breeding strategy.
In any ecosystem,
big, fierce animals that eat meat are always rare.
This is because big, fierce predators by their nature get only a small
portion of the earth's solar energy as it is passed down the food chain
beginning with the primary producers which use the sun's energy directly
by using photosynthesis, such as plants and algae. Only a fraction of
the sun's energy is available to big, fierce predators.
"Humans were rare as tigers are rare, because there is not much food to be won at the profession of big, fierce hunter." (p.53)
Humans evolved in a specific niche as well, just like every other
animal. Humans evolved as big, fierce predators following herds of
megafauna across the savanna while gathering a wide variety of plant
materials, nuts, seeds, fruits, tubers, and so forth, along with the
occasional seafood. With our omnivorous diet and use of tools and fire,
we could pivot from different sources of sustenance as they became rare,
thus acting as a sort of equalizer, keeping down the numbers of
whatever species happened to be overabundant in an ecosystem and
changing when they became rare. We have spent over ninety-five percent
of our evolutionary history under these conditions.
We evolved primarily for Ice Age conditions, that is,
humans are inherently creatures of the Ice Age.
Far from being a harsh environment, it is the environment for which we
are most ideally suited. While northern regions were colder, most humans
were concentrated in the wide bands around the tropics, and the water
locked up in glaciers meant that there was actually
more land
available in these areas, with plentiful prey. Savanna ecosystems
covered more of the earths surface, and humans evolved as apex predators
in these ecosystems. We are suited to small-scale social groups and low
population density. When the last glacial period ended, the climate
changed and much of the earth's megafuna started to die off. The
savannas receded, and coastal areas disappeared (such as Beringia, the
Sahul and Doggerland). Humans found their niche shrinking. They embarked
upon a great experiment.
Humans, because they could manipulate their environment, broke free of their ecological niche.
We could enlarge our niche at will using technology.
We directed ever more of the earth's primary productivity to ourselves,
starving it from other living things. We domesticated dogs for hunting.
We domesticated herd animals and protected them from competing
predators. We slashed and burned entire ecosystems using fire and
replaced them with only the plants we wanted. We stored and redirected
the flow of water on the earth's surface. We selectively bred only the
plants and animals we desired, hijacking the process of natural
selection. We artificially enlarged the food supply and made it more
reliable. These were all ways of changing our niche.
Once we broke free of our niche, we broke free of the limitations on niche size imposed on us by that niche.
While big, fierce animals are always rare, we began to become more
common like social insects such as ants rather than apex predators. We
ate lower on the food chain. Our flexible diets permitted this, along
with our ability to pass things down through social learning and
cooperate in large numbers. Our big brains, tools, and cooperation
allowed us to access foodstuffs unavailable to other animals through
processing, such as the small, dense packages of carbohydrates stored in
plant seeds. We essentially became overnight herbivores instead of
predators, something unheard of in evolution. With that came the
negative health consequences we continue to see to this day.
When we invested in artificially changing the immediate ecosystem, it
made sense to remain in one place rather than following the disappearing
herds. This led to sendentism which, along with a more reliable food
supply, led to population growth, and hence to crowding. Also, the
arrival of soft foods such as grain and milk decreased weaning times and
allowed for more children, changing the breeding strategy. Once you
have made significant investments in your area, you get sedentism and
private property. Once you have surpluses, you get inequality. And once
you have population increase, you get crowding and social conflict.
Eating like an herbivore at the bottom of the food chain meant more
people, but more people living unhealthy lives in drudgery, poverty, and
misery. Instead of being just predators, man became both predator
and prey.
"The
first farmers gave up the role of carnivores in the ecosystems of their
times and took to herbivory as if they were cows or rodents. It was
this habit of agriculture which let our numbers grow from the rarity of
bears to something like the commonness of rabbits." (p.61)
Increasing the food supply by changing the niche gave our perfected
breeding strategy a chance to show of what it was inherently capable.
Unless we changed the breeding strategy, which we have never done, there
would, inevitably, be a great increase in the number of people living.
Each individual, remember, is programmed to try to thrust as many
descendants as possible into the next generation, and it is competition
for niche space that winnows the surplus. But, if more niche spaces
can be made almost at will, there will be no more competition. All
offspring raised to maturity will find a niche in which they can live
and raise offspring of their own.
The Darwinian breeding strategy of the animal that can create unlimited
jobs for its offspring would lead to an unlimited number of survivors. Substitute
the words "very large" for the word "unlimited" in the above sentence
and we have one of the results of the great people-experiment of
changing the niche without changing the breeding strategy: people have
overrun the world.
When we lived in a constant niche like all the other animals, there were
essentially no population consequences of this perfected breeding
strategy of ours. As the niche never changed, so the numbers of the
people never changed. What has changed since those ancient times is not
the breeding strategy, but the niche. We have learned to live not only
as hunters or gatherers, but as farmers and industrialists as well.
These are quite different ways of life from those of our ancestors, and
they can provide for populations of quite different sizes. This is why our populations have grown since those early days: because the niche has changed. All of us still breed to press more of our descendants into the next generation than there is room for. In the old days this made no difference, because the job opportunities of niche never changed. When we started to change our niche, the opportunities for life went up, and our numbers rose accordingly.
Once we controlled our niche, this allowed for a wide a variety of experimentation with lifeways and living patterns leading to
cultural
evolution. Social learning became the primary means of passing down our
ability to live in a certain niche. This also allowed us to colonize
every area of the planet.
Original niche learning had little effect on our numbers, because every
culture exploited similar varieties of foods. We were always hunters of
gatherers. Ancient people learned their professions of life, just as the
followers of modern professions learn theirs. It was this fact that
made us ready for the dramatic changes of niche that were to come later.
(p. 51)
The invention of institutions to cope with growing numbers is an ongoing
process, continually unfolding, and the mismatch between our Ice Age
habits and our modern circumstances is the underlying cause of many of
social maladies we see today, from drug addiction, to teen pregnancy, to
child abuse, to depression, to obesity.
"We no longer live in the ancient human niche, but we still could, or
rather, some small number of us could since there would not be room for
many. It must, therefore, follow that we still possess the traits that
equipped us for that ancient niche, even though we have turned our
skills into living in quite different ways. We have invented and learned
most of our new ways, so they must be wholly new. But some of the
ancient adaptations that we did not have to learn are still with us."
(p. 47)
As we came together in farming village-based societies, one's niche was
no longer getting sustenance from our immediate environment, but rather
one's role in then the superorganism known as society. New niches
emerged such as farmer, herder, artisan, merchant, priest, king,
soldier, slave. This gives rise to a new definition of niche. Normally
it is how an animal gets its food and makes its living. But Colinvaux
also uses it to describe how people make their living; a definition
common today as well. We speak of niches such as professional,
politician, bureaucrat, worker, laborer, criminal, and so forth.
Following ecology, Colinvaux dives social niches into
broad niches and
narrow niches. Broad niches are what we describe as
wealth, and narrow niches are what we describe as
poverty.
Upon the rise of society, most people were crowded together in the
lower, more undesirable narrow niches as slaves and primary food
producers, toiling away for the benefit of the upper niches. However,
the size of these niches changes over time based on conditions such as
the number of people in the society, the available resources, and
technological development. Many of these changes drive history, as he
describes later on.
As Colinvaux describes,
a niche is a way of making a living. In an example he provides, there are only so many spots for aeronautical engineers. That niche is
finite;
it cannot expand simply by producing more aeronautical engineers. It
can only expand if there is more of a need for aeronautical engineers,
such as a boom in the aerospace industry, or the discovery of new key
technologies. The same thing goes for lawyers, doctors, senators, or any
other profession. Just like animals who occupy an
ecological niche,
each societal niche is of a fixed size, and therefore if there are more competitors than there are spaces available to them, social conflict must be the result:
We know that the number of people who can earn their living as
aeronautical engineers is set by the job market for these highly
specialized skills. The number of people actually filling the niche of
aeronautical engineering cannot be altered by training more engineers in
college but only by making the aircraft industry boom. An ecologist
would say that niche-space determines the population of the species
"aeronautical engineer," just as niche-space determines the number of
squirrels. Similar arguments apply to all human professions, just as
they apply to all kinds of animal niche.
Western societies have recently tried a large-scale experiment in
flooding niche-space when they expanded the university population,
particularly the graduate schools...Universities have produced very
large numbers of these presumptive professors, rather as if the
squirrels had a very good year for raising young. But the number of
professorships sets the opportunities for professing...Now surplus
bearers of doctorates cannot accept the scholar's tenure, however cum laude
their degrees...People have the quality, not shared by other animals,
of changing their niches. Surplus squirrels always die, but surplus
scholars, lawyers and aeronautical engineers take up other trades. Yet
it must be remembered that all human professions have this in common
with animal niches, that the number of individuals following each
profession, or niche, is absolutely set by the conditions of their ways
of life. Niche sets number. (pp28-29)
If you expand the candidates for a specific niche space without actually
increasing the niche space available, all you do is increase the
competition, which inevitably leads to
more social conflict, not less, including oppressive governments and caste systems (see next post).
More education does not magically call forth the need for more jobs. Thus, education, rather than being a silver-bullet solution for poverty, often leads to
more
problems than it solves. In places like Africa, there are already many
more educated people than there are niches for them. Many of those
educated poor leave, where they increase competition for niche space in
wealthier societies, causing cultural clashes, and increasing
competition for a limited number jobs:
When a country starts on mass education even before there is a rapid
expansion of the niche-space through technology, as many in the Third
World are doing now, the result must be a social crisis. The crisis is
like the excess production of aeronautical engineers, which I described
earlier, but on a national scale and for all the appetites of middle- or
upper-class life. In a version of the old saying about more chiefs
than Indians, it is a deliberate production of more chiefs than there
are chief jobs available. The only escape for the surplus of the
newly educated in one of these countries is emigration, if some more
developed country will take you; the only escape for the government is
repression of the new intelligentsia. The developing world is rich in
examples of both these measures. (p. 79)
This is especially relevant given the economists' arguments for "more
education" as the solution for the problems of the developing world,
including both chronic poverty and overpopulation (see below).
Crowding also brought forth the need for governments, and those in these
administrative and leadership roles occupied the most desirable niches
in society. It also brought forth niches allowing specialization in the
art of violence, such as generals and soldiers. Because big-game
hunting requires a high degree of specialization and leadership, we were
already primed for those things during the Ice Age. But now,
management, authority, and lifetime occupational specialization became
permanent features of the human condition. We became specialized, as
insects are specialized.
"Our primeval niche let us take kindly to government because the old
social life involved divisions of labor. Hunting in groups needs
collaboration and mutual support. Even herding, which ties people to
beasts, requires some directed collaboration, and agriculture ties
people to ground and food plant, so that government for any society more
dense than a one-family plot is essential. The institution of
government did away with the nightmare of people being reduced to
perfectly equal peasanthood. But escape may be only for the fortunate
few--the governors." (pp. 68-69)
As agricultural village societies became increasingly large, they
eventually evolved into the first cities. Inside these dense, urbanized
cultures, for the first time people came into daily contact with large
numbers of unrelated strangers. New social institutions emerged, such as
money and organized religion, as did new social roles. Eventually,
city-states emerged as the new dominant social structure in the fertile
river valleys, and these city-states were the incubators for crafts,
writing, architecture and metalworking:
The organization that we call a "city-state" is the logical, indeed the
inevitable, outcome of the invention of agriculture by an animal of
social habits. Agriculture requires settlement. An unchanged breeding
strategy makes that settlement dense. Government in a dense community
requires specialization. And a dense settlement containing both rulers
and ruled must inevitably divide up the country into land to live on and
land to farm. The city-state has emerged, along with a rationale
that requires people within it to have different specialties—that is,
different niches...The need for government in dense communities did
more than just save a few individuals from the worst consequences of our
change of niche. It also allowed further increases in the carrying
capacity. Government could ration, distribute and hoard. Surplus and
deficit could be balanced from place to place, and from season to
season, ensuring an even flow of the necessities for life, making the
luxury of large families the more safely enjoyed.
The people who occupied the upper niches in society, such as government,
religious and military authorities, were able to live much in the same
way as their Ice Age ancestors had. They had access to a wide variety of
resources such as foodstuffs (especially protein), sex, durable goods,
artistic pursuits, leisure time, and lives of relative luxury, ease and
comfort. Their lifestyles allowed for variety in their daily routine and
consumption habits of things like food, drink, and sexual partners:
"The immense flux of resources required for each niche-space of wealth
can best be realized by reflecting on just one propensity of the
wealthy, the propensity to choose. The wealthy seek variety, both
in daily activity and in real opportunity. But any freedom of choice
must mean that, for everything done, there be something left undone. Freedom and wealth, which are to some extent linked, require very many resources per niche-space. The wealthy, and the truly free, therefore, must be rare." (p.71)
By contrast, life was much worse for the vast majority of peasants who
lived under the whip of an overseer, having to cope with overcrowding,
substandard diets, malnutrition, backbreaking, routine work, celibacy or
monogamy, and disease. This led to the permanent institution of wealth
and poverty, where the wealthy can command ten, fifty, a hundred, or
even a thousand times more than the average person; something impossible
in a hunter-gatherer society:
The organizers in a city-state, be they governors, bureaucrats,
businessmen or priests, led active, wide ranging lives that needed many
resources; an ecologist would say that they had a broad niche. The mass
of the people needed much less, little more, in fact, than would be
wanted by that ideal agricultural peasantry; they had a narrow niche.
The broad niches of the governors meant wealth, but then the narrow
niches of the mass could be given a new name, "poverty." "Wealth" and "poverty" are but names we give to two extreme kinds of ecological niche.
The niche of wealth demands more resources per individual than does the
niche of poverty. Wealth even takes more food, for a wealthy person
actually eats more calories than does a poor person. Even more
importantly, the wealthy person tends to eat higher on a food chain,
requiring more meat. This means that any patch of real estate probably
can feed between ten and a hundred times as many of the very poor as of
the very rich. How many rich people there can be, therefore, depends on
how many people are trying to get their living from the land; it depends
on population density...Wealth and poverty are both inventions of
agriculture-based humanity, but poverty is more of an invention than
wealth. We make people poor by denying them the types of food,
activities and space that were consumed in the primeval human niche,
whereas the wealthy retain many of these old assets.
Because people were not naturally happy occupying the narrow niches,
competition for the upper niches became intense. But because it takes
more
resources to make a broad niche, however, there are necessarily less broad niches than there are narrow niches, and hence less freedom:
We must think that our most perfect evolutionary triumph would be a
society of agricultural peasants, sedentary, marvelously numerous,
living in a landscape set the very minimum of animal food, freed from
the very minimum of animal food, freed from the threats of predatory or
competing animals, and having a family size again brought down to meet
the needs of replacement and set by the fact that there should be no
food to rear more than two or three children per couple. Peasants such
as these would be the ecological apotheosis of humanity...
But people have not been able to change the human niche so completely as required by this triumphant evolutionary nightmare. They have not wanted to be the perfect food-raising food-consuming peasant.
Many individuals resist peasanthood very strongly indeed, trying to
preserve more ancient ways of life and even wanting to do things that
the ice-age peoples could not do; they want to go adventuring like a
hunter, to paint, to craft, to make machines...
Our breeding strategy, however, remained unchanged from that of our ice-age ancestors:
each couple continued to raise the number of children they thought they could afford. Colinvaux's key insight is that
the poor will always have more children than the rich. This is because
the children of the rich require more resources to raise than those of the poor. The rich require a lot of resources in terms of food, shelter, money, education, assets,
et cetera,
to raise children in the manner to which they are accustomed. By
contrast, for poor people, raising children requires only minimal
resources. There are almost always enough resources for another starving
peasant, but not for another prince.
"Each human way of life will have its own characteristic size of family." (p.41)
Because it takes scant resources to raise a child in poverty, the hopelessly poor will opt for large families.
They are doing their Darwinian thing, estimating the number of children
that can be raised to compete for niche-spaces in their world of
chronic poverty and then arranging to have families of this calculated
size. The wealthy, on the other hand, must plan for each child to be able to compete for niche-space in a world of wealth...When
the Darwinian cost-accounting is done in a wealthy family, the stark
fact is that the certain and successful rearing of a child, fully
equipped to become itself a parent in its parents' world, requires a
very heavy investment. Wealthy parents, like poor parents, seek to raise
the largest number of children that they can afford, for this is their
animal breeding strategy which has never changed. But wealthy people cannot afford very many children, despite their wealth. (p.42)
Across a whole society, breeding strategy is based upon
hope,
specifically the hope that a person's children will have a higher living
standard than their own. This means that growing, prosperous societies
will inevitably have growing populations, Times of plenty lead to a
rising populations, and hence more competition for niche spaces,
especially for the broad niches. Thus,
rising numbers lead to rising aspirations.
Colinvaux pours cold water all over the idea of the "demographic transition."
This is the observation, scientifically unsupported, that families in
wealthier societies tend to have fewer children on average than poorer
ones. This is explained by the above. In richer societies, the option of
occupying a relatively broad niche will still cause people to have
fewer children than people who do not have that option.
But there will continue to be a surplus of children. The only reason that the surplus is slightly smaller is because
wealthier families demand more resources for each individual child than do poorer ones.
Since rich children command more resources per capita than poor
children anyway, relying on increasing wealth to save the environment is
a strategy condemned to failure:
And yet a noisy propaganda is about which denies that rising populations
cause poverty. We are told by most eminent politicians and
international experts that the rising numbers, far from being a cause of
poverty, are in fact a result of poverty..."Poverty is the cause of
large families" they say. "Do away with poverty—by foreign aid or by
giving to charity—and the population problem will take care of itself."
It is an appealing, comforting hope; but it is false.
People who lean on this propaganda are deluded by the very true
observation that the moderately affluent have smaller families than the
comparatively poor. They say that giving poor villagers of the Third
World the money and education of someone living in a French or American
suburb would result in their having smaller families, as indeed it
would; provided that the new affluence was safe for a generation or
more. The poor villagers would pass through a "demographic transition,"
as I explained before. Affluent couples cannot afford as many children
as can poor couples because many resources are required to raise a child
to affluence...But this does not mean that poverty causes population
growth; it is the growth that causes poverty, and the affluent West can
lose its affluence by packing more people in. Poverty is growing in
inner cities already.
It can happen, and often does, that populations grow more quickly in
poor countries. But this does mean that populations do not grow in
wealthier states as well. In fact, we know that they do...What matters
is the eventual population density. It is the number of people per unit of resource that determines the size of a niche and, hence, what we call a standard of life.
Coping with more people in each succeeding generation is the ultimate
drive for technical innovation...But poverty will always be present,
because any large increase in resources produced by new technology will
be taken up within a few generations by the provision of more poor
people. (pp. 73-74)
Only chronic poverty and lower living standards can permanently slow long-term population growth:
Smaller families for the rich than for the poor are explained and
predicted by the ecological analysis of the human breeding strategy, as
we have seen. But this does not mean that numbers in a rich society will not rise, only that they will rise more slowly.
Breeding strategy still ensures that each couple will raise the largest
number of children it can afford and, under most conditions of wealth,
this is likely to be more than enough to replace the parents. Making the
poor wealthy will slow the rate at which children are raised, giving us
more time to anticipate or plan the historical happenings that their
crowding will bring, but it can never stop the children coming in excess
supply. (pp.42- 43)
Neither will birth control work. Since people modify their breeding strategy based on their niche,
people in narrow niches will continue to have the optimal number of children for that niche.
Access to birth control is still dependent on them actually using it,
which is solely a matter of individual choice, absent some sort of
compulsion. And those at the lowest niches of society with the fewest
resources need to have the largest number of children:
It is essential to realize that people of poor countries have their large families from choice.
The poor themselves will tell you that they need to have children to
look after them in their old age, or to have sons to go out to work when
they are ten years old, or to have daughters whose marriage will bind
families together. They might even say that children are a "comfort";
that they like children. These are but ways of saying that they are
looking to the number of children decreed by their way of life, or the
number demanded for them by the workings of the human breeding strategy. In either language, the poor have large families because they want large families. Providing the poor with birth-control devices will not result in fewer children.
Only desperate poverty has been shown historically to slow the rate of population growth:
But it is still possible for the human breeding strategy to cause population losses, as well as population gains. This
will happen when a community is reduced to such despair that the
average opinion of the ideal size of family puts it close to zero.
Or, if hope yet allows some couples to start families, then the
conditions of the people are so desperate that they cannot succeed. A
single generation of desperation can remove a whole community for good.
It is to this possibility of near total failure of the breeding effort,
not to massacres of adults, that we must look for the decline of
populations in history...(p. 44)
This leads to another of Colinvaux's critical insights, which is that
people in the more desirable niches are the first to feel the effects of crowding. They also feel the effects of crowding more
acutely,
since they are accustomed to a higher standard living than the masses.
This is counterintuitive. We naturally think crowding is felt more
acutely by the people at the bottom, and that they are eventually are so
staved of resources that they are driven to desperation and revolt.
Not so, says Colinvaux. Rather, the swelling ranks of poor put pressure
on the wealthy, who will turn to various measures to cope with it. It is
the attempt to crowd ever more people into the broader niches which is
the primary driver of attempts to expand the ranks of those niches by
various means such as war, colonization, trade and technological
advance; or ways to restrict access to them such as caste systems and
repression.
"Politicians nowadays talk of "the population problem" as
if it were mainly a worry for poor nations and the underprivileged, but
this is wrong. The wealthy are the ones to be squeezed because the wealthy use the resources that the new crowds will want." (p76):
A broad niche requires numerous resources; an expansive way of life can
be provided for only relatively few. But more young people equipped to
live in an upper-class way will keep coming in succeeding generations as
our breeding strategy manufactures more people. Niche-theory
predicts, therefore, that rising numbers will always cause trouble for
the wealthy before they cause trouble for the poor.
Technology is another way to grow the available niche space, but this
strategy was necessarily limited in the ancient world. Since technology
changed fairly slowly from generation to generation, population growth
was necessarily faster than technological growth. Except during brief
periods of either low population growth or rapid technological advance
(such as the last one-hundred and fifty years), rising numbers have
always led to more poverty:
Every couple, rich and poor alike, continued to rear as many children as
it could afford. Numbers always rose. The extra resources wrung from
the land by cleverness and industry always went to supporting more
people at the old levels. As fast as a few individuals could be
raised out of poverty, as fast as the actual numbers of people living
richer lives increased, so also more babies were born into the world to
swell the actual numbers of the poor.
Population growth is a geometric, or exponential, process. The
cleverest of people, and the most enlightened of governments, have never
increased the flow of resources exponentially at an even faster rate
than the growth in demand represented by the extra mouths, except for
short periods of rapid technical advance. Industrial societies of
the West are experiencing one of those short periods of rapid advance at
the moment, and there have been others in the past. But always a plateau has been reached.
It must be so. The rate of increasing production falls but the rate of
population growth does not fall. Then poverty must get worse and more
visible, for not only do the numbers of people who must be poor
increase, but each poor family finds itself poorer and
poorer....Ecology's first social law may be written, ''All poverty is caused by the continued growth of population." (italics in original)
Rising numbers inevitably cause more poverty, and more pressure on the
higher niches. This leads to people in the higher niches taking various
measures. To cope with an excess of aspirants to the broader niches, elites of
various societies have turned to a variety of strategies, and it is
these strategies which drive the historical process:
For the early stages of the growth of a civilization, therefore, niche
theory predicts life in settlements, continually rising numbers, a
ruling class living in broad niches that include many dimensions of the
primeval human niche, technical innovation from those who have broad
niches already, the persistence of poverty, and an actual increase in
the numbers of the poor.
Ruling classes that feel themselves threatened by the social pressures
of a rising population have only two courses of action open to them.
They can find more resources to provide good niches for more people or
they can restrain the pressure on niche-space by a system of oppression.
The most interesting ways of increasing the flow of resources include trade, colonies and war. These are always tried. The
alternative, constraining the appetites of rising numbers by some
system of force, is also always tried. It involves regimentation,
bureaucracy, class, rationing and caste.
Thus, it is population growth caused by the various breeding strategies,
and the effects of crowding on the broader niches which provides the
driving force and distinctive episodes in the historical process, from
the wars of conquest, to the colonization of far-off lands, to the
wholesale abandonment of the countryside, to the establishment of
long-distance trade, to the rise of surveillance states. In the
following chapters, Colinvaux lays out his theory of why history happens
according to the ecological principles described above:
Behind all the great climactic struggles of history we will find
symptoms of an expanding population. Whenever people have been ingenious
so that the quality of their lives has improved they have let their
numbers rise. The demand for more resources for the better life has always been more than the prevailing political systems could provide. And
the grand themes of history have been the result: repressions,
revolutions, liberations and always, in the end, aggressive war.
Perhaps little wars and petty repressions can often be explained as
being caused by no more than human wickedness and animal passions, as
various social and biological writers have argued. But all the truly
great wars of history, those that ended with shifts of peoples and the
remaking of maps, were caused by increases in the numbers of people and
associated increases in demand. We can examine the wars, the
growths, and the falls of civilizations from ecological principles which
describe how resources must be divided between people and which show
consequences of changing the numbers of those people. From this study a
predictive theory for the fates of civilizations, including our own,
will emerge. (pp. 23-24)
People's breeding strategy is based on their social niche. Those in
narrow niches require much less resources, and hence breed more
children. The children of those occupying broad niches demand more
resources per capita, and hence there are less of them. Nevertheless,
each couple raises the number of children it thinks it can afford.
This leads to rising numbers overall, and more competition for spaces
in the broad niches. This leads to social unrest. Thus the pressure of
rising numbers is felt by the upper classes first, rather than the mass
of poor people below, because they have the resources and lifestyle that
people in the lower classes desire:
Ruling classes that feel themselves threatened by the social pressures
of a rising population have only two courses of action open to them.
They can find more resources to provide good niches for more people or
they can restrain the pressure on niche-space by a system of oppression.
The most interesting ways of increasing the flow of resources include trade, colonies and war.
These are always tried. The alternative, constraining the appetites of
rising numbers by some system of force, is also always tried. It involves regimentation, bureaucracy, class, rationing and caste.
(pp. 79-80)
Because the effects of crowding are felt in the ranks of the broader
niches first, political revolutions tend to come from the ranks of the
upwardly-mobile middle classes as their aspirations are frustrated. It
is rarely instigated by the peasant classes, and even when it is, it is
rarely successful. We see this throughout history. Even peasant
revolutions which are successful are usually led by people from the
ranks of the upper or upper-middle classes, such as Maximilien
Robespierre, George Washington, Simon Bolivar, Vladimir Lenin, Mao
Zedong, Fidel Castro and Che Guevara.
Middle and upper-class niches are inventions. They are developments of
our original trick of changing the primeval niche through agriculture
and settlement. When new niches are first invented, few people live in
them; an ecologist would say the niches are "empty." We should expect,
therefore, that many generations must pass before life in these new
niches could be crowded. It must follow, then, that the social unrest,
which is the prime indicator of crowding in these better niches, will
always be long in coming. Lulls of social peace occur, particularly as a
small inventive state begins the process of growth. Social unrest
follows, always as a distinct episode This is why revolutions are
revolutionary, a sudden upset of the old ways, as in France and Russia,
or the upheaval of 1848 when kingdoms collapsed all over Europe. These
events all followed technical change and rapid population growth, but
were decades in the making (p.78)
When those in power must lose privilege because the numbers of their own kind rise, social unrest must follow. Social unrest, therefore, is a necessary consequence of changing the niche without changing the breeding strategy.
Furthermore, the unrest will be a middle-class phenomenon and probably
episodic. The troubles come from trying to pack in a few more of the
relatively wealthy, not from packing in many more of the relatively
poor.
I suggest it is axiomatic of human history that social upheavals,
even revolutions, do not emerge from the ranks of the poor...They come
from disaffected individuals of the middle classes, the people who
experience real ecological crowding and who must compete for the right
to live better than the mass...The episodic quality of these
revolutions comes about because scattered disaffection alone may have
little result. Individuals can wage a brief struggle for the niche of
their parents, then accept defeat and sink to a narrower vocation in
life. (pp. 76-77)
One way to cope with the surfeit of claimants to the upper-class niches over time is the establishment of a
caste system,
in which access to niches is limited by some sort of social convention,
thus tamping down competition and social conflict. This could be blood
relations, or it could by something else, such as wealth or ability.
Colinvaux speculates that the extraordinary stability of certain Asian
societies was due to long-standing caste systems.
"It was the stability of neither change nor opportunity." (p. 83)
We think of caste systems as something from ancient India, but there are
many varieties, even though they are often not perceived as such. In
the ancient near East, slavery was hereditary, as was kingship. High
priests were often a separate caste based on blood relations (such as
the Levite tribe of Israel), and you couldn't become Pharaoh by working
on the pyramids. The formidable Spartan warriors were made possible by
the Helot slaves who made up the bulk of Spartan society, toiling away
to produce the agricultural surplus and allowing specialization in
warfare. Roman society divided into patricians and plebeians. In the
societies of classical Greece and Rome, slaves made up to eighty percent
of the population.
Medieval knights and lords were supported by serfs who were tied to the
land they farmed. China had an imperial examination system whereby one
could increase one's status through intensive study (but not become
emperor). Many positions in British society could only be held by the
aristocracy up through Victorian times and beyond (a military commission
was bought, for example). Today, we might say that access to the broad
niches is restricted by your family's wealth. Nearly every large,
complex society in history has developed some sort of caste system.
"Castes
promote a stable society because they ration people to jobs, not all of
which are the most desirable. They ease the pressures of crowding on
the broad niches of the most cultured. Furthermore, castes are logical
for an animal who maintained its primeval niche by learned taboo." (p. 81)
Castes have been described from many ancient societies--Egypt,
Greece, Rome, Persia, Fiji as well as India and Europe of past
centuries. Castes are apparently ubiquitous. They ration resources among
the populace when broad niches are not attainable by all. They raise
and educate an individual to one of the many niches of society. (p. 84)
Caste systems must largely fail before universal education, which, at
least in part, trains people to choose from a variety or vocations for
which they might be prepared. But education does not remove the need for
constraint; if caste no longer works to choose a niche, some other
constraint has to be invented. In a market economy, the individual is
allocated a niche by economic circumstance. In a socialist state the
individual is allocated a niche by a government official. But people are
still sent to a way of life that has to be, for most of them, less than
the best. It is always crowded round the broader niches, and the more
dense the population, the more crowded it will be. The defenders of a
high way of life must push against the competition. Social oppression is an inevitable consequence of the continued rise of population. (emphasis in original) (pp. 84-85)
As described above,
competition for prestige niche space leads to social oppression by the elites.
As societies become more crowded, political repression must always
follow. Societies with low population density have more freedom. As the
effects of crowing become more acute, the governmental authorities
impose ever more restrictions on behavior. It is societies with low
population density and plentiful niche space which typically enshrine
individual freedom and liberty as part of their highest ideals.
Societies that talk a good game about freedom and liberty have always
been those where there were plenty of spots available in the more
desirable niches to accommodate the aspirants to them. They tended to be
growing, expanding societies, with plentiful resources and low
population density. But crowding inevitably invites repression, as
people occupying upper niches try to limit claimants to their positions.
This leads to a repressive police state. Freedom and liberty go by the
wayside, and democracy withers away, even though it is still honored
more in the breach than in the observance.
Crowding in the upper ranks must produce a response in the government of
society. We can expect that the descendants of those who once labored
for the poor might well become inward looking, concerned only with the
defense of their own privilege. Like poverty itself, a gradually repressive ruling class must be the inevitable consequence of indefinite population growth. (p.79)
This leads to the first broad strokes of Colinvaux's ecological theory of history:
After the original inventions of wealth and poverty, therefore, niche theory predicts:
- That middle and upper classes will be the first to feel the pressures of crowding.
- That ruling classes which previously were sympathetic to the mass will become selfish and oppressive.
- That social troubles will be episodic rather than continuous.
- That methods of allocating people to the more narrow niches will
evolve. Caste systems are the most human [sic] of these methods, but
capitalist economies and socialism have their equivalents.
- That even under oppression, population will be stable only if the
optimum family for the most miserable class is less than the needs of
replacement.(p. 85)
Eventually social conflict becomes intolerable, and rising numbers cause
societies to expand and lash out. Colinvaux describes three common
methods of doing so -
trade,
colonization, and
war.
When you run out of niche-space for the good life, you can always look
for more somewhere else—through trade, through colonies and through
aggressive war. We think of trade as "good," colonies and conquest as
"not so good." Yet all three serve to tap the resources of other people's land. And they all need military hardware for success. (p. 85)
As societies seek to expand, they inevitably come into conflict.
Colinvaux explicitly rejects the "great man" theory of history. Instead,
he argues that
the victorious society is always the one with the superior military technique.
He uses numerous examples throughout history, from Egyptian war
chariots, to the Macedonian phalanx, the Roman legion, the Iranian heavy
cavalry, the steppe horse archer, the English longbow, the French
massed infantry, to the Panzer divisions of World War Two and finally
nuclear weapons. According to Colinvaux, the victorious society is
always the one with the superior military technique.
Where do these techniques come from? Conflict zones are the crucibles
for the development of these techniques. A great portion of the book is
given over to military history to elaborate this point, and these vivid
portions of the book are worth reading in their own right. Colinvaux
argues that the conquests of Alexander the Great were due to the
superior military technique of the Macedonian phalanx, which had been
forged during centuries of incessant conflict between the numerous
city-states of the Greek peninsula competing over a limited amount of
land. Furthermore, Greek colonization and trade had led to the
development of a superior navy, which increased the advantage (see
below).
This is what allowed Alexander to defeat the Persians in battle. That
Alexander was a brilliant military strategist was secondary to the fact
that he had the superior military technique. Alexander's conquests are
an example of a growing society expanding to take land from its
neighbors, and hence acquiring niche space.
Colonization is another way of expanding niche space. The parent society
sends out colonists to form children societies. The branch society
often takes land from the natives by force. They can do this because
they have developed superior military techniques in the crowded
conditions of their parent societies. They also have superior ways of
making a living that allow them to support more people at higher
population densities.
Again, the ancient Greeks provide a perfect example as they spread out
across the Mediterranean, forming colonies such as the city of Syracuse
in Sicily. The Phoenicians are another example, as they used trade to
create new niches for their people around the Mediterranean, and founded
colonies such as the city of Carthage on the coast of North Africa,
which grew into a military power in its own right. Colonization and
military conquest are on a continuum of seizing niche space from others:
True colonies represent the simplest form of land theft. You send out
soldiers, occupy a piece of land and fill it with settlers. You carry on
your own expanded way of life away from the parent city, not so much
relieving congestion at home as providing the necessary opportunity for
the increased numbers in each generation. When you have many colonies,
you might fill in the gaps between and make a small nation-state. All
colonization is aggression, but there is a gradient from making a small
settlement to wholesale annexation of aggressive war. You use your
superior weapons to take niche-space from others, by force. (p. 90)
The conflict between Rome and Carthage is illustrative. Rome came into
conflict with the neighboring tribes of the Italian peninsula. Through
centuries of warfare, they developed the Roman legion, anchored by
severe discipline. Carthage, unable to expand into the interior of
Africa due to geography, terraced the hills around the city and
practiced an intensive, highly productive agriculture, and turned
outward to the sea in trade and colonization. They founded colonies all
around the Mediterranean, including colonizing the Iberian Peninsula.
This caused them to develop into a formidable naval power.
"Trade is the simplest of the three ways to expand. You say where you are and fetch objects you want in ships." (p.85)
Colinvaux's insights on trade are especially interesting, especially
given their prominent role in modern economics. According to him,
trading regimes develop not to supply necessities to the parent country,
but from a desire of the middle and upper-middle classes to expand
niche space. Those who are frustrated with not enough niche space in
their respective societies look outward to buccaneering trade to
provide sufficient lifestyles for themselves by tapping the resources of
other people's land. Aggressive, ambitious individuals who find their
ambitions thwarted at home turn to adventurous trade to create new
high-status niches, and have done so throughout history.
Trading regimes expand niche space not just for the traders themselves,
but also for other people in the home society as well. People at home
must make the articles for trade. New positions are created marketing
and distributing the articles of trade. Trading societies are
expansionary, which leads to higher living standards and population
growth for such societies:
Our historians talk with approval of the "merchant adventurers," the
people who sought a broader way of life through trade. For trade to
work, there must be a market for imported commodities, but this market
will result from the very increase in population which drives the
better-off to trade. The way must always be open, therefore, for sons of
the wealthy to find lives of freedom in importing objects that the
masses want. We expect trade to develop not in the service of the hungry poor, but in the service of the aspiring middle class.
The ecological hypothesis predicts trade to be important in a state
only when there are too many people trained to better-class ways. But
trade must also have an immediate effect on the opportunities
open to all classes, because the parent society has to make the objects
to be spent in trade.(emphasis in original)
In creating niche-space (jobs) for children of the wealthy, trade must also create jobs (niche-space) in the parent state.
Because people must make things to sell outside, trade multiplies the
niche-spaces available in the crowding state. First people can find a
broad-niche life by engaging in trade, then other niche-spaces are made
at home for those who supply the articles of trade. But even the
stay-at-homes are getting part of their living from other people's land.
It is quite wrong to think of those who stay at home as being supported
by the homeland, because many dimensions of their niches are supplied
by the foreign states who take their manufactures.(p. 86)
We've seen this before. There has always been a conflict between
merchants and the aristocracy. In ancient Egypt and Rome, trading was
strictly controlled by the state. Chinese merchants and traders were
often checked by the aristocracy, who feared their power, and the
Samurai in Japan controlled trade to an extreme extent.
Where trade did develop, it was wealthy, middle-class individuals denied
from places in the aristocracy who were at the vanguard of trade. In
Spain, Portugal, England and the Dutch Republic, it was wealthy
middle-class individuals (the
bourgeoisie), not the peasants, who
established trading regimes. These led to prosperous societies at the
expense of other cultures. Classical Liberalism can be seen as a debate
between these two forces. It can be said that after the Glorious
Revolution and the establishment of William of Orange on the throne
(funded largely by British banks), the aristocracy decisively lost out
to the merchant caste, sealing the fate of England. The conflicts
between merchants and landowners would continue throughout the
nineteenth century, as seen in the debate over the Corn Laws.
As trade grows, living standards increase for all. This causes population growth, causing trading regimes to become
dependent upon trade over time to feed their growing populations. But--and this is important--
expanding populations are a consequence of successful trade, not a cause of it. Again, this seems counterintuitive:
After trade becomes commonplace, the hypothesis predicts a second and inevitable consequence: the mass of the people will become dependent on imports for their very subsistence, very likely even for their food.
They do this because their numbers go on rising after trade has become
important to the state, as well as before. This late-arriving portion of
the population is dependent on imports for necessities. Once,
therefore, a state begins seriously to trade, the rising numbers that
trade makes possible become dependent on continuing the trade.
This analysis departs drastically from conventional wisdom about trade.
We usually think of trading states, say modern England or Japan, as
being driven to trade in order to feed their people. Modern politicians
in those countries make speeches about "having to export in order to
live," which leads people to think that the dense populations came
first, and that some desperate necessity drove the crowded masses to
resort to foreign commerce. But the ecological analysis denies this. The crowded masses are not a cause of trade, but a consequence of it. The only way in which crowding causes trade is through the pressure on the lives of the better off.
Children of wealthy people engage in adventurous commerce to maintain
their own standards of life. By doing so, they make it possible for more
people to be raised in subsequent generations. These new people are the
ones who are physically crowded. They are dependent on commerce,
certainly, but they only appears as a result of the commerce started by
others.(p. 87)
Colinvaux's other insight about trade is that
trading regimes must necessarily develop into military powers.
This is because trade is dangerous: you are moving large amounts of
goods through hostile territories where they can easily be seized by
hostile governments or pirates. To counteract this, military techniques
must be developed that are not only capable of projecting force, but
also sacrificing as few soldiers as possible, since you are typically
not fighting on your home turf. This leads to the development of
powerful weapons and military techniques by trading regimes. We also see
this throughout history, from the Phoenician trade and colonies, to the
Greek and Carthaginian navies, to the Venetian Arsenal, to Islamic
merchants, to the Spanish and Portuguese galleons, to the British Empire
which ruled a quarter of the earth's surface at one point. These
thasallocracies develop superior weapons and military techniques that
allow them to dominate much larger populations with small amounts of
people.
A civilized soldier employed by the merchants will be armored, for he
fights not out of pleasure but from calculated necessity.Getting hurt is
to be avoided. Weapons, tactics and discipline will reflect the
organized life of his thriving city. The hypothesis predicts, therefore,
that an emerging trading state will develop the best weapons and armor
that their technology can produce; the city will take, as it were, a
cost-effective attitude to the arts of war. (pp. 88-89)
Colinvaux's insights on trade, then, can be summarized by the next predictions of his ecological hypothesis:
We can add to the list of predictions of the ecological hypothesis:
- That trade will develop as the niche-space of middle and upper classes becomes crowded.
- That opportunities in manufacture increase as trade grows.
- That the population rises and grows denser as a consequence of trade.
- That the trading state acquires advanced weapons and an army. (p. 89)
As Roman society grew and prospered after the Carthaginian defeat, this
led to rising numbers, and rising numbers led to an emptying out of the
countryside. This leads to another of Colinvaux's conclusions--
that rising numbers in a society will lead to an emptying out of the countryside and a crowding of people into cities. Again, this may seen counterintuitive.
"Surely we need more food producers out on the land to produce enough to feed all the hungry mouths in the cities," is what you might be thinking.
Not so, says Colinvaux. The reason is because it allows the landscape to
be farmed more intensively through large farms than by smaller ones.
Throughout history the countryside has emptied out to feed growing
cities ever since ancient Mesopotamia. This is because large farms
worked by slaves producing monocrops for export leads to greater
surpluses than small-scale subsistence farming. A concentration of
wealth allows small farms to be brought up by bigger ones, eliminating
niche spaces for farmers. They then head to the cities to be merchants,
artisans, shopkeepers, soldiers, or simply layabouts. It is far easier
for governments to feed urban masses centralized in a dense city than it
is to feed a population dispersed throughout the countryside.
This emptying out of the countryside was remarked upon by numerous
ancient Roman writers. Colinvaux argues that these writers looked at the
empty countryside and abandoned small farms and concluded incorrectly
that this was a consequence of the population
shrinking, when it was, in fact, a sign of the population
growing.
We know that the cities of ancient Rome were sustained by the massive
shipments of grain from places like Egypt and North Africa, along with
other commodities such as olive oil from Spain. The empire could only be
sustained by a vast shipping network moving surpluses from
sparsely-populated rural areas to feed the masses of idle, hungry
citizens in the urban areas who could revolt at a moments notice. It's
notable that years of incessant conflict between the patricians and
plebeians in ancient Rome ceased after Augustus seized Egypt and shipped
the surplus grain to Rome to placate the restless masses (bread and
circuses).
...There is a drift from the land as peasants are displaced in the
interests of increased production. This happened in ancient Greece and
Rome no less than in the time of the enclosures in Tudor England, or in
modern industrial states. The process can be seen in the development of
every civilization. Feeding great numbers of people is more easily
done if they are brought together in dense settlements; running the
agriculture needed to supply those dense settlements is more efficient
in the larger agricultural units of agribusiness. And the "drift from the land" is a predictable consequence of a dense population growing denser.
It follows, therefore, that partial depopulation of the countryside
results from population growth: the land looses [sic] people even as the
total population climbs. It is easy to mistake this loss of people from
the country districts as evidence of a population fall. Roman Pliny
made this mistake and there are historians who have followed his errors
to this day. But emptying of country districts must be a usual
consequence of a population rise, not of a fall. The modern United
States of America is an example.
In actual human practice, the first-order reason for driving peasants
from the land was to enrich the landlords, but societies put up with the
miserable injustice involved because the new ways were more productive;
letting the landlords have their way yielded more food for the state,
and if pushing even more people into the growing populations of the
towns' displaced peasants, it at least promised bread for those growing
populations. This is the argument of our "green revolution," an argument
that has been used as long as there have been civilized states. "The
people must be fed; farm the land efficiently for the benefit of dense
settlements."(pp. 100-101)
As a society becomes wealthier through trade and conquest, the citizens
of that society prosper. Since there are more niches available to them,
their numbers invariably increase, since people still have the number of
children they think they can afford. Rising living standards and hope
mean rising populations, again more for the poor than for wealthy, since
the wealthy demand more resources to raise their children and are
accustomed to a higher standard of living. In fact, many of the highest
upper-class patrician Roman families died out because they did not have
enough offspring to sustain themselves. The "golden age" of Antonine
emperors from Hadrian to Marcus Aurelius did not have biological sons to
sustain themselves:
Yet at the very top of the social heap it is possible that a few
families were small enough to be below the replacement rate. An
intriguing suggestion of this lies in the fact that none of the Antonine
emperors had sons to succeed them except the last. This was a very
fortunate circumstance for Rome, because these men then adopted sons to
be their successors, choosing boys for their quality to be emperors
themselves one day. It was probably this circumstance that gave Rome its
precious hundred years of stable government in Antonine time. The good
years ended when the wise Marcus Aurelius most unwisely left the Empire
in the custody of a real but quite unfitted son, Commodus. (p. 163)
Associative mating, where rich people marry exclusively other rich
people, consolidating wealth in the upper class niches, becomes more
common as well. But despite it all, the numbers will keep on rising.
A final strategy after oppression, caste systems, colonization and
foreign trade, is simply seizing the lands of your immediate neighbors
by aggressive war. We saw this already with Alexander the Great seizing
the neighboring lands of Egypt and Persia. The situation was different
for the Romans.
Unlike the lands to the east which had older, more complex, settled
civilizations and large, crowded, urbanized populations, the lands of
the barbarians were sparsely populated due to the barbarian's ways of
making a living, and thus relatively empty from the Romans' point of
view. The barbarians still lived in small, tribal, village-based
societies, just as the Romans had once done. They had low population
density and hence much individual freedom as a consequence. In fact,
Roman writers wrote admiringly of the rugged independence, ferociousness
and courage of the Celtic and Germanic barbarians they encountered.
Nonetheless, the superior military techniques of the Roman military
machine were pressed into service to seize their lands and expand the
Empire. Roman industry fled across the Alps from the areas of the
Mediterranean depleted of forests and topsoil, and the barbarians were
displaced by vast latifundia dedicated to feeding the urban masses:
When numbers and aspirations for broad niches continue to grow beyond
what can be accommodated by trade, then the only expedient left is
outright theft. A growing city-state will certainly find itself in a
world peopled by others less citified and less densely populated. Very
likely much land will be full of wandering herdspeople or nomadic
farmers, ways of life that not support dense populations. It may even
happen that citified people will find lands still occupied by hunter
gatherers, as when Europe first thrust itself into North America. More
often the surrounding lands will be inhabited by people whose ways of
life the city folk had left behind them some generations before. What is
certain, however, is that the neighboring land is, by the standards of
the city, underused and undersettled. The city-state will be
surrounded by cultures whose technology of extracting niche-space from
the land is inferior to its own. Taking over this land is an obvious
thing to do.
The ecological hypothesis predicts, therefore, that a society will
engage in land theft when its organization and aspirations show it to be
better able to extract a living from the surrounding lands than the
people already there. And it follows that a society which has reached
this position also has, and knows it has, the better weapons.
Land theft means planting a colony or annexing a whole territory. Both processes must be resisted by the people already there. But
those of the civilization who covet the land have an advanced
technology of war, inevitably, by reason of the technology and trade
which has made them a city. When they begin armed emigrations,
whether for colonies or for empire, they cannot be stopped. This is why
nations like Rome or Greece built such glittering victories.(PP. 89-90)
This is also likely to be self-defeating, as eventually the empire can
no longer expand. This may be because of technological limitations, or
by running up against inhospitable environments or hostile natives who
can use the landscape to their advantage, as the Romans found in
Germany. Also, what often happens is that the neighboring peoples adopt
the military weapons and techniques of their more powerful neighbors,
which leads to a bloody stalemate as the parent society no longer has
the superior technique. He uses the example of the Roman empire versus
the Germanic barbarians and Sassanid Persians.
The Persians were the first to deploy heavily-armored cavalry for use in
warfare. They were also early adopters of horse-mounted archers who
were able to fire while retreating--the so-called
"Parthian shot." The Eastern Roman Empire adopted the Persian heavy cavalry techniques as the Byzantine
cataphract,
allowing it to hold onto its territory. Eventually, the heavy cavalry
of the cataphract was adopted in turn by the barbarian Goths, who used
it to defeat the Byzantines at Adrianople. The use of heavy cavalry
spread throughout the barbarian tribes, and was the basis of the
medieval knight, who dominated warfare until the adoption of gunpowder.
Eventually, the barbarian tribes who seized North Africa from the
decaying Roman Empire were overrun by another outsider barbarian
group--the newly united tribes of Arabia under the banner of Islam.
These mounted horsemen, accustomed to the techniques of banditry and
raiding, swept out of the desert conquering everything until their path
until they met the armored knights of Charles the Hammer in France and
the Byzantine cataphracts of Leo in Turkey. These societies all expanded
until they met others who had equal or superior military techniques to
their own, whether invented or adopted. And they were all driven by
expanding populations looking for niche space.
When the leading classes of a state have led their people through the
stages of technical improvement in manufacture, a class hierarchy,
trade and the colonial expropriation of land, they are coming to the end
of the possibilities for finding more niche-spaces. Yet a society
putting all these into effect is likely to be a buoyant one and its
people are likely to be conditioned to the long success story. The
breeding strategy, therefore, will certainly work to keep families
relatively large. Each couple of the colonial state will choose its
family in some hope, and this will be so in both parent city and
daughter colony. This means that the succeeding generations will see
more people still, not just starving poor but more particularly aspiring
upper castes and classes.
All that can now be done by the rulers to keep control is more of
what has gone before, and this we must expect: more attempts at trade,
more social ranking, more aggression. Aggression seems the most promising alternative.
Sending out a civilized army to take yet more undeveloped land is not
only likely to succeed, but also exciting. And so niche theory suggests
that a tide of aggression ought to flow out of the expanding state until
a time comes when something stops the flood of armies; perhaps the
distance of communications, perhaps reaching a boundary defended by some
other army of almost comparable technique, perhaps a combination of
both.
Aggression remains available as a solution to crowding in the more
desirable niches only for as long as the weapons of the state are
superior to the weapons of any people within reach. The aggressor
state will always be both wealthy and wanting more wealth. Victory will
always be achieved through superior technique...
We will find a similar pattern of events behind all the greater conquests of history. Aggressive conquest is to be expected whenever population and aspirations grow together.
Up to now every advance of civilization has been accompanied by rising
desires and rising numbers. Always this has resulted in aggressive war.
Ecology's second social law may be written ''Aggressive war is caused by the continued growth of population in a relatively rich society." (emphasis in original) (PP. 91-93)
A crowded population with superior weapons and tactics seizes land from
its neighbors. This creates more niche space. Aggressive wars become
popular among the citizenry, and the society becomes militarized and
warlike, lionizing their martial prowess and celebrating war and
military victories. Aggressive war becomes a habit to nations that
pursue it successfully. But in these victories is the seed of decay. The
options are running out.
Once the society is at its height, with plentiful niche space, all that is left is decline. New
powers are on the horizon, and they have copied the techniques of the
more successful societies, and perhaps even improved on them (the
advantages of backwardness).
The society becomes sclerotic, and this leads to social conflict and
decay. In the end, the Roman empire turned to incessant fighting and
civil wars as disparate elites battled it out for niche space at the
top, while the newcomer barbarians at the bottom of society, who
required fewer resources than the native-born Romans, outbred them, even
while adopting key elements of Roman culture. The empire was overrun by
less dense, less sophisticated powers from outside as it lost a sense
of common purpose. Eventually, population did decline, but only after
the collapse.
Colinvaux dismisses the "spiritual/biological theories of history" which
argue that a society goes into decline because it has a fixed lifespan
just like an individual, or that societies decay because of a sort of
moral malaise, loss of spirit and vigor, or a failure to rise to certain
challenges. Rather,
it is the rise of population and an exhaustion
of options for expanding niche space which leads to social conflict, and
ultimately, collapse:
The combined expedients of better government, better technique,
emigration and going to war can, of course, never produce more than a
temporary relief from the pressures of demand. If numbers go on
rising, the condition of the people, both leaders and led, will be as
constrained as ever within a few generations at most. However large the empire built from underdeveloped lands, there has always been a finite limit set by logistics and geography. When all is full there is nowhere else to go.
Niche theory predicts, therefore, that a limit will be reached to the
number of broader niches that can be found by ingenuity, trade and
theft. And yet, the theory also predicts that the numbers desiring broad
niches will continue to increase. The empire will become crowded for
its upper classes. It is this phenomenon which is likely to be the
cause of decay. Social unrest is now inevitable.
As the empire crowds, freedom of choice must be an early casualty. There
has to be more government to allocate and control. Bureaucracy will be
getting more complex, its practitioners more numerous. This is so inevitable a consequence of expansion that a minor ecological social law might be written, "All expansion causes bureaucracy."
But the bureaucrats cannot make more resources, they can only allocate what they have.
Opportunity for betterment wanes, and initiative must wane with it. The
army is no longer the pathway to a good life and will be neglected.
After all, the only role soldiers have left is defense against distant
barbarians. Once a fresh military power appears at the borders the empire must fall.
In the final days the empire may linger on if it can impose so stern a caste system that many families are held small by want. This is what some of the longer lasting civilizations such as Byzantium and India achieved. But this works only until other states catch up with the static weaponry of the moribund empire. Then comes destruction. The final set of predictions can be summarized, then, as:
- Superior weapons will be used to expropriate land and to plant colonies.
- All aggressive enterprises are undertaken with superior military technique and in a calculated manner.
- Aggressive wars are launched by rich societies and come from the needs of the comparatively wealthy, not of the poor.
- An elaborate bureaucracy and loss of freedom will always appear some generations after the establishment of empire by conquest.
- Collapsing empires will have rigid caste hierarchies and stagnant military techniques.(PP. 93-94)
Colinvaux then compares his ecological theory of history against Toynbee's massive work,
"A Study of History."
He finds that it describes the observed historical pattern much better
than Toynbee's own theories about spiritual decay, which Colinvaux sees
as quasi-mystical not based in hard science.
In
A Study of History, Toynbee charts the rise and fall of
twenty-one distinct cultures he identifies*. He distinguishes these
civilizations based on their unique cultural, religious, spiritual, and
artistic outlooks, and their economic, social, and political
organizations. Toynbee attempts to identify a common pattern in the rise
and fall of each of these civilizations.
He sees a harsh and unforgiving environment as the required crucible
which presents certain challenges to a group of people. If these
challenges are difficult enough, but not so harsh that they overwhelm a
culture in its infancy, it forges a distinctive cultural "spirit" in
that group of people. A society which overcomes the challenges presented
to it formulates a distinctive mode of life:
A society, according to Toynbee, develops into a civilization when it is
confronted with a challenge which it successfully meets in such a way
as to lead it on to further challenges. The challenge may be a difficult
climate, a new land, or a military confrontation (even being
conquered). The challenge must not be so difficult as to be
insurmountable or even so difficult that the society does not have
sufficient human resources and energy to take on new challenges.
Rubbish, says Colinvaux; a better explanation is the ecological
hypothesis. A harsh and unforgiving environment doesn't make the
"spirit" of a people stronger, it just means they run into ecological
limits sooner due to population pressure. This pressure leads them to
prey upon their immediate, weaker neighbors who have less dense
populations, developing superior military techniques and discipline
along the way. The harsh environment forces the people to be adaptable
and hardy, and enforces internal social cohesion. The winners of these
Darwinian conflicts inevitably expand, assimilating their neighbors
through trade, conquest and colonization, exactly as Toynbee describes:
Civilizations arise in marginal lands; Toynbee says that people need the
spiritual shock of a hard environment to give of their best. An
ecologist is not surprised to learn that marginal lands foster
aggressive civilizations, though less impressed by Toynbee's belief that
the arousing of the spirit is what counts. It is in marginal lands
that the pressure of rising numbers will be felt first, forcing
expansionist zeal, the limits are reached sooner in marginal lands,
habits must be changed sooner if want is to be avoided, and aggressive
armies become an earlier requirement. Once the armies are made, the
people of a marginal land only need a victim for their aggression, and a
plump victim is always by definition waiting next door. (p. 98)
Toynbee describes a
creative minority at the upper echelons of
society whose activities and thought patterns animate the actions of the
broad mass of people below them. The responses of the creative minority
to challenges presented become worthy of emulation by the majority, and
the society expands under the leadership of this creative minority:
Toynbee believes that the ideas and methods for meeting the challenges
for a society come from a creative minority. The ideas and methods
developed by the creative minority are copied by the majority. Thus
there are two essential and separate steps in meeting a challenge: the
generation of ideas and the imitation/adoption of those ideas by the
majority. If either of those two processes ceases to function then the
civilization breaks down.
Colinvaux would see such people as occupying the broad niches of a new
society early on when the niches are relatively empty. According to
Toynbee, this
creative minority eventually hardens into a
dominant minority
who become ever more repressive over time. Colinvaux would say that it
is when the niches at the top of society become filled that the creative
minority ossifies into a "dominant minority, steadily becoming more
oppressive over time due to increasing competition for niche space.
Toynbee claims that it is at this point that societies coalesce into what he describes as the
dominant minority, an
internal proletariat of citizens outside the ranks of the dominant minority but nevertheless members of that culture, and an
external proletariat of people on the fringes of the society under its influence, but still distinct and separate from it.
The internal proletariat becomes ever more restless as opportunities dry
up, and conflict ensues between the dominant majority and the internal
proletariat as the former become more insular, repressive, and
inward-looking. At this point, a society becomes increasingly
destabilized, not from below, but from the ranks of the
internal proletariat as
the overproduction of elite aspirants necessarily means that upward
mobility is limited. This leads a society-wide loss of faith in elites
and social institutions, leading to what Toynbee terms a
time of troubles:
If the creative minority fails to command the respect of the majority
through the brilliance and rightness of their solutions to the problems
and challenges of the society then the minority becomes merely a
dominant minority. In the breakdown of a civilization the society splits
into three parts: the dominant minority, the internal proletariat (the
working masses which are part of the civilization) and the external
proletariat (the masses which are influenced by the civilization but are
not controlled by it.
Colinvaux would see this as the effects of crowding on the living
standards of the upper classes of society, since they use the resources
that the majority desires. As he describes, the people occupying the
broad niches are the first to feel the effects of rising numbers, and
they will become steadily more oppressive over time while establishing
caste systems to assign people to the available narrow niches. The
establishment of some sort of caste system leads to conflict between the
frustrated, upwardly-mobile middle classes and the top--the dominant
majority and the internal proletariat:
From then on, Toynbee's reconstruction is as predicted by the ecological
hypothesis. There is, for a time, a "creative minority" of people whose
example is willingly followed by the mass, but the "creative minority
slowly changes to a repressive "dominant minority. The mass no longer
emulates, becoming instead a sullen "internal proletariat." (pp. 98-99)
As Colinvaux describes, people will be driven from the land and into the
cities as intensive agricultural techniques are employed to feed the
growing numbers of people. This will cause the ranks of the internal
proletariat to swell. There will also be broad discontent as wealth
concentrates in the hands of the dominant minority:
From the time of troubles onward the population shifts within the state.
There is a drift from the land as peasants are displaced in the
interests of increased production...The surplus people of the
countryside go to swell the ranks of Toynbee's "internal proletariat,"
already being bred in the cities. To these are added the inhabitants of
conquered less-developed lands, driven in turn from their fields by
civilized businessmen. Spent soldiers join them, their stipulated
service over and their military usefulness gone.
So there always developed in the great cities of empires large and
growing populations with very little to do except be house servants or
formal slaves of that dominant minority which expanded to provide both
the governors and the bureaucrats of the state. All could be given bread
for a long time by improving the efficiency of agriculture, and by
taking the new efficient method to the freshly conquered lands of the
spreading empire, but each new advance of technology, or regiment, sends
its own quota of exiles to the central city, there to join that
breeding proletariat in, but not of, the culture of the times. (pp.
100-102)
So far Toynbee's history goes as an ecologist would expect. Endless
growing numbers both maintain poverty and give it such institutional
form as slavery. The new technology which increases resources is never
able to exceed the demands made upon it by ever more mouths, and its
only real result is the closer herding of people, together with the
growing bureaucracy needed to constrain them. Wars of conquest relieve
matters, but only for a short time. When the victory has been truly
great, then the numbers who can aspire and live in large niches is
expanded for a while so that hope can flourish also. This is why
conquering societies talk so much of freedom and liberty. But the
increased living space must be filled quickly by the broad-niche
"species" in society so that the hopes of succeeding generations must be
curbed. Then the needs of an ever-growing proletariat must press
upon even the large living space won by conquest. The only stability
then is the short-lived one of people knowing their place. (p. 102)
The
time of troubles is ultimately resolved by the absorption of the external proletariat into what Toynbee calls a
universal state.
The universal state is typically seen as the apotheosis of the
civilization, but it is actually a sign of a civilization in its autumn
years:
The disintegration of a civilization involves a time of troubles, such
as a time of wars between the nations which are parts of the
civilization. This time of troubles is followed by the establishment of a
universal state, an empire. The existence of a universal state such as
the Roman Empire is evidence that the civilization has broken down.
Colinvaux would see the establishment of a universal state as a logical
response to the pressures of crowding on the broader niches. The
universal state is a way to create new, broad niche opportunities for
the internal proletariat through colonization, trade, conquest and war.
Indeed, we could say that all of these empires can be partially thought
of as vast trading regimes with similar laws and institutions imposed
from above by force to bring them about. Empires are necessary for vast
trading regimes - The Roman Empire knitted together the Mediterranean
region into one vast market; years later Genghis Khan's brutal rule
would allow fruitful exchanges between Europe and China.
But once the universal state is established, even though the empire
seems to be at its height, it is already decaying internally. The
original culture has occupied distant lands; both the internal and
external proletariats have expanded rapidly, and elites become
increasingly isolated and take to warring among themselves and looting
the underlying society, leading to a crisis of faith in institutions.
Politicians become increasingly insular and self-serving, feathering
their own nests while neglecting the common good. As people lose faith
in the old order, they turn to new modes of life, often adopting new
religions and cultural institutions in the process. The final sequence
is:
Ultimately the universal state collapses and there follows an
interregnum in which the internal proletariat creates a universal
religion and the external proletariat becomes involved in a Volkerwanderung, a migration of peoples.
The universal religion and its philosophy are usually borrowed from an
alien civilization. The development of the new religion reflects an
attempt by the people of the internal proletariat to escape the
unbearable present by looking to the past, the future (utopias) and to
other cultures for solutions. The religion eventually becomes the basis
for the development of a new civilization. Religion amounts to a
cultural glue which holds the civilization together. There is thus a
close relationship between religions and civilizations.
Colinvaux describes it this way:
In the mechanisms of the times of trouble, which forge the internal
proletariat and pave the way for the great captain and his armies, can
be found some off the more revealing workings of ecological process. Not
only do small crowded states war with each other, but capitalist
business always emerges with all the social problems it brings in train.
This is society trying to increase resources with improved technique,
working to increase the size of the cake at home while its armies are
fighting to increase it abroad...(p. 100)
But eventually, often after several generations of turmoil, a more able
chieftain than the rest imposes his military will; the people gather
thankfully behind the prospect of peace which he offers, yielding to him
the instrument with which to establish an empire. The evolving
civilization has culminated in a "universal state," and there may follow
a protracted period, as under the Roman Empire, when an ordered society
persists, the dominant minority remaining in charge, the mass
constituting the "internal proletariat" consenting or collaborating in
its bondage. But in the end the social order always decays. (p. 99)
The dominant minority is hard put to defend the boundaries of the empire
against neighboring peoples and these evolve into a hostile alien
force, the external proletariat. Finally, with the breakdown of
order within, and the increasing hostility of the less disciplined but
freer spirits from without, the empire crumbles leaving behind only
traces of its culture and religion out of which those who have inherited
its impoverished lands can begin again the process of invention and
order.(p. 99)
Eventually, the means of war, colonies and trade expand to their
greatest extent possible for the time. Caste systems are resisted by the
restless and footloose masses clamoring for alternatives. The empire
cannot accommodate them and disintegrates. Stagnation (stagflation) sets
in. Population may finally start to decline, especially in crowded and
filthy urban centers.
In the end, collapse is all but assured as the people inside the state
turn on each other, leading to something that from outside looks like
"moral decay." Social cohesion disintegrates and elite overproduction
sews chaos:
But an empire always has an edge, at first diffuse and spreading, but
later almost stationary. Its actual position is a function of
contemporary technique in warfare, government and transport. Outside it
live people whose kindred have been conquered, absorbed, oppressed,
deported, or even slaughtered by soldiers of the civilized state. The
survivors beyond the pale have learned something of the civilization's
technique in fighting, and have also learned to lead mobile lives, so
that they may avoid forays of the empire's soldiers...A whole new way of life, a new niche, has thus been developed in response to the pressure of the empire's people.
Footloose, self-sufficient, partly nomadic, warlike; it is a way of
life which often seems admirable to the imperial governors who confront
it...Toynbee finds such people living on the boundaries of all the
civilizations he studies, calls them the "external proletariat," admires
them, and tells us that they have in common the writing of epic poetry.
(pp. 102-103)
In Toynbee's account the war bands of the external proletariat are
eventually to cut their way into the dying empire, hastening its fall...An
external proletariat, forged from people who do not care to live in
cities but who must run from a civilization's soldiers, is, with the
knowledge of hindsight, a plausible outcome of the building of an empire...once
the external proletariat has perfected the new way of life its own
numbers will tend to rise, forcing it always to look for more resources
both to safeguard children from want and to apportion among its younger
sons. Trained to war by their way of life and equipped with some of the
military techniques borrowed from the empire, their obvious expediency
becomes armed raids across the borders. Their pressures on the empire
must grow as their numbers rise, and an empire steadily weakened by the
pressure of its own miserable masses finds itself ever more strongly
attacked by armed young men from outside.(pp. 103-104)
Outside the gates of the civilization, a new culture is expanding,
selectively adopting the successful methods of commerce and warfare
developed by the dominant culture. The external proletariat are
accustomed to living with less, so their birthrate is higher. They are
more self-sufficient, not being able to rely upon the vast trading
network forged by the dominant society's elites. As the dominant
society's wealth concentrates in the hands of the sclerotic dominant
majority, and the internal proletariat's numbers decline even as those
of the external proletariat rise.
These trends culminate in a new civilization which arises out of the
ashes of the old, either from outside it, or from within the crumbling
society itself. New challenges are confronted, and a new creative
minority emerges from the external proletariat. The cycle begins again.
This is similar to Ibn Khaldun's analysis of the thirteenth-century
Maghreb, with nomadic peoples (the "external proletariat") who have been
oppressed by the primary culture and having a greater sense of
social solidarity and cohesion (
asabiyah), eventually able to
defeat their oppressors. Their greater sense of social cohesion allows
them to conquer and assimilate the settled urbanized civilizations which
have fallen into decay.
At the height of the empire, after a period of stability a collapse is all but assured in the twilight of a fading civilization:
The fading summer of each of Toynbee's civilizations passes with the
muted mutter of dissension in thee big cities and ceaseless petty war at
the frontier. But, at last, government crumbles at home, and war bands
from outside swell over the disintegrating mass, Toynbee draws lessons
of the spirit from these events, looking for the prime causes in the
class war, the failing vigor of a privileged minority and the social
injustice of commercial exploitation at home, contrasted with the
ennobling experience of the external proletariat, which left it
independent and tough.
Moral virtue then triumphs over moral decay and the lands of the empire
are inherited by new peoples who proceed to build a new civilization on
its ruins. No doubt these events do strange things to the human
spirit, but their prime cause is not spiritual; it is an animal breeding
strategy applied to human affairs. All of what Toynbee sees is
predicted by the ecological hypothesis; all is the inevitable consequence of trying to provide a better life for ever increasing numbers of people. (p. 104)
Those were Toynbee's conclusions on the rise and fall of all the
twenty-one major civilizations that he thought he could recognize from a
long perusal of history. The creative minority, the successor dominant
minority, the time of troubles which ushers in the succession, the
internal proletariat, the emerging conqueror or great captain whom
Toynbee sometimes calls a "saviour with a sword," the universal state
that he builds, and the long autumn of order while the state endures as a
stable thing with all knowing their place—are all events predicted by the ecological hypothesis.(pp. 99-100)
For example, in the case of ancient Rome, once expansion was no longer
possible, declining social mobility, increasing poverty and despair, a
loss of the tax base, a brutal police state, economic failure and
stagnation, low growth, internecine warfare among elites, political
corruption and sycophancy, futile, open-ended wars, and social decay
followed. These are all symptomatic of a culture in decay. The culture
can no longer rise to the challenges presented to it:
Yet, for all the peace and stability of the Antonine years, there was
much about life in the empire which was far from admirable. There was a
rigid caste system, with a social pyramid which grew ever steeper
despite changes at the top as more provincial people were given Roman
citizenship. The gap between rich and poor was desperately wide, and
growing wider. Slaves could still be treated with a ferocity almost
incomprehensible to people of our day. Growing masses of the urban poor
lived without work, in disgusting tenements, on welfare payments of
grain and entertained by horrible murders of prisoners and beasts in the
public arenas built in every city for this necessary purpose.
Recession showed up as a chronic failure of tax revenue. Roman governors
were always hard put to pay and equip their soldiers, and they had to
meet even increasing expenses to keep the mass of the people in the city
tenements from rebellion by giving them free food. In the last century
they actually had to meet the expenses of a true police state, paying
out a network of spies and informers...The emperors resorted to the
Roman equivalent of printing money. They debased the coinage, mixing
cheaper metal in gold and silver and declaring that the new coins had
the same value as the old. Our modern governments push out paper and
call it "wealth"; the Romans pushed out base metal and called it
"wealth"; and the result was the same...Emperors tried wage and price
controls, backing them up with brutal threats...but it did not work.
They succeeded only in ruining the middle class. At the top of the
social pyramid the depressed economy made government difficult. For the
mass of people in the lower castes it made the chance for betterment
hopeless. (pp. 156-158)
What was left to the Roman rulers was repression, and they learned to
apply that solution very well. Indeed, repression was forced on them
early, of course, as they enslaved their world with swords, javelins and
terror. The old Roman Republic bequeathed to the Empire a state already
based on slavery, repression and fear. Early reliance on social force
actually helped bring about the very failure of technique which required
that growing populations be held down by more force still, because a
slave society of the massively poor is not likely to be technically
ingenious—for why make a machine when there is cheap muscle to do the
work? Romans came very close to real industry, needing, for instance,
only the slightest advance to produce steam engines, but no Roman made
the small tricks of invention necessary. The repressive social system
stopped them by requiring slaves, and the social system itself had to be
made more repressive still by default of invention.
Social repression in the late empire tells us that the Roman possessions
were crowded, as indeed they were. All the niche-space winnable by
conquest, trade and slave-based industry had run out. If you were middle
class or better, your children could only hope to live as well as you
by elbowing someone else's children. This is real crowding in the
ecological sense; all niche-spaces filled and the numbers still coming.
Low population densities in parts of the Empire make no difference to
this conclusion. (p. 166)
"Recession" is not really the right word to use for these failures of
the Roman economy, however, because there was growth. The Romans seem
never to have stopped building roads and aqueducts and cities, nor did
they fail to make weapons for armies which grew continually larger. But
the growth was painfully slow. It was steady progress, not recession,
even if slow enough to look like stagnation to us. But the slowness had
the fatal consequence of never producing a surplus of capital to
invest... (p. 158)
Then came strong-man rule. It was achieved by a series of military
despots, men like Severus (that first emperor of African and possible
Carthaginian descent), Diocletian and Constantine, who had a genius for
the imposing of order by tyrannical force. They made a police state out
of the empire.
The smell of the police state comes down to us very clearly from the
century preceding Constantine when Rome held its last sway in united
government as one state under one ruler. Soldiers ruled; and feeding
armies without payment became a first task of those living where the
legions were stationed. Taxes increased and the bureaucracy became ever
more complex. The social pyramid grew even steeper, developing into a
caste system rigid perhaps beyond a real understanding. You risked your
life if you spoke unconventional thoughts. Spies and informers were so
prevalent that it was sometimes dangerous to talk in public at all. (p.
159)
Then came renewed troubles and the final, fatal wars. The Empire which
had been built by force and together by force, was finally destroyed by
force; real alien force brought in by armies from outside. The Empire
from the time of its wealth, therefore, went through a stable century,
wars of military adventurers, a triumph of despotism, and eventual
subjugation by foreign foes. In outline, this history sounds very like
the general predictions of the ecological hypothesis; in detail the fit
seems even better. (pp. 159-160)
Sound familiar?
One element that is especially fascinating in both analyses is how rising numbers bring about a change in the
spiritual outlook of a people. While some have speculated that increasing
wealth was a cause of the emergence of moralizing religions, in Colinvaux's thesis it is the rising
poverty
caused by excess numbers which brought about the distinctive character
of the Axial Age religions which gave people the coping skills to learn
to live with increasing poverty, misery, and low class mobility.
Unlike the earlier dominant pantheons dedicated to the martial virtues
of a confident, expanding, cohesive culture, these new religions all
preached the same basic things: that life is full of suffering; the poor
will always be with you; you should care for the sick, elderly and
vulnerable; you should accept your lot in life with resignation and make
the best of it; you will live in ease and comfort in the next life as
opposed to this one; and so on. Such religions teach people how to be
joyful in the face of despair.
In the end Toynbee notes that a world religion rises from the oppressed
proletariat and persists long after the empire has fallen. He claims
that all the major religions of the world arose in this way; they
started as religions of those subjugated in empires. Ours of the
West was one, built out of conquered people desperate under the
exactions of Roman military rule. Ecologists can easily understand the
form these religions take. Much of the appeal of proletarian world
religions lies in their counsel to the oppressed to endure. Nothing can
be done; the poor are with us always; rely on your spiritual strength
and make the best of things. For the crowded masses, to whom Jesus,
Buddha, Confucius, and their like appealed, there was, no hope for an
improvement in the standard of life. People knew in their bones that the
lives of their children would be no better than their own lives.
They did not know that the reason for this was the swelling numbers of
people who used up new resources as fast as they could be created, but
they truly knew the outcome all the same. So, by the device of a new
religion, crowded, poor, citified people have always turned to the
plastic properties of the human spirit, learning to be happy with very
little. People learn to live in very narrow niches when religion
teaches, and world religion is but another expression of learning the
necessities of life by the process of taboo.
It is fascinating to note that India, long the most crowded of
civilizations with an extreme caste system, developed some of the most
sophisticated systems of spiritual development ever seen. Eastern
mystery cults emerged in the decaying Roman empire, with one of
them--Christianity--emerging as the dominant cultural factor in
post-Roman society. Islam replaced disparate nomadic tribal gods and
preached peaceful submission and care for the poor. Buddhism taught
people to cope with falling living standards by turning inward. All of
them forbade usury and preached care for the poor and downtrodden, such
as the giving of alms and
Zakat. All of them also depersonalize
nature and exalt man. Perhaps the dominance of these religions has much
to do with their ability to help people cope with the suffering caused
by the effects of overcrowding in a world where the population is
expanding geometrically. Is it any wonder we see the rise of religious
fundamentalism in places like the Middle East and the United States as
the economy decays and the hope for a better life is thwarted for the
majority of people?
It's interesting to view the above procession against what we normally
conceive of as collapse. Collapse is often seen as a fairly linear
process, but the above shows that there will be a variety of responses
by the elites of society, which will prolong the inevitable. There are
many methods that a society has at its disposal to keep itself propped
up and to keep conflict from boiling over, and these are fairly
predictable. The nature of these responses are described by both Toynbee
and Colinvaux. It is also important to note that collapse is assured
when the empire is at its
height, not on the way up.
Yet the measures - free trade, migration, wars, new technology, and so
on, are seen as permanent solution to problems, when in reality they are
only stopgap measures employed by desperate societies in their autumn
years. The kick-the-can measures only mean that the problems will
eventually reconstitute themselves down the line in a more intense
crisis. Eventually, a reckoning is due, but the process toward that
resolution is jagged and complex, and often hard to discern against the
noise of daily life.
After outlining his ecological theory of history and making the
comparisons with Toynbee, the central portion of the book is dedicated
to applying the ecological hypothesis to various episodes in world
history.
The longest of these is what Colinvaux calls the "Mediterranean
episode." He gives this as approximately the flourishing of Greek
civilization and the conquest of Alexander the Great, through the rise
of Rome and the Punic wars, through the collapse of the Roman Empire and
the partitioning of its former lands between the Christian barbarian
kingdoms, the Islamic caliphates, and a remnant of the Eastern Roman
empire.
I've already alluded to many of Colinvaux's insights in previous
entries, but a few points are worth mentioning (all emphasis mine). The
beginnings of the Mediterranean episode come from settling down into
urbanized village life:
The immediate effect of switching, even gradually, from barbarism to a
settled city life is that the population grows. The new economy produces
more food, the new niche permits people to be content when living more
closely packed, each couple can raise more children and does so, and the
numbers of people steadily increase. So it was in Greece.
The ecological hypothesis predicts that this process will lead to
colonial enterprise, to trade, to much fighting, to an oppressed
proletariat, to high technology in war, and to the creation of empire by
military means as a popular goal. The written history of Greece shows
how each of these things came about, and even reveals that the Greeks
knew something of what was happening to them. (p.114)
On the effects of Greek geography and culture on their war-making ability:
The pattern of these various consequences of rising numbers and
changing niche in Greece was influenced strongly by Greek geography. The
land is both mountainous and dissected by embayments of the sea. This
meant that scattered city states could grow in a partial isolation from
each other, having defensible state boundaries and well limited patches
of local resource. It may well have been this isolation of each Greek
city-state that helped to foster the refinement of their remarkable
military hardware, protracting wars between neighbors, letting victories
be indecisive so that return engagements could follow after a few years
spent in perfecting armament. Certainly it is true that the first and
most fundamental of civilized fighting forms, the armored phalanx, was
better refined in Greece than in any nation of which we have record.(pp.
114-115)
Highly civilized weaponry was a fact of life to free Greek citizens.
Every independent man owned the weapons of hoplite infantry and knew how
to use them. His own money equipped him for war. He could be "called to
the colors" at any time, and he went willingly. Front line soldiering
was both the duty and the privilege of the substantial citizen, and the
poorer classes went to war merely in his support. The better-off fought;
the less-well-off supported. And this was reasonable, because the
colonies and trade on which the high standards of life of the wealthy in
a Greek city depended could be guaranteed only with expensive weapons. (p. 118)
The Greeks responded by colonizing the Mediterranean;
"like frogs around a pond" according to Plato's description:
Each of the major city-states of Greece sent out colonists to found
tributary cities elsewhere; scattered round the coasts of the Persian
dominions, in North Africa, in Sicily and beyond. This was how local
city states, each pressed into an ancestral valley of the rugged Greek
terrain, had found opportunity for businessmen and adventurers alike.
...The people of Athens could find more niche-space for the Athenian way
of life by building colonies which would duplicate Athenian ways, and
they did so.
The state of Athens grew through colonies and trade in a somewhat
different way. The land was not lastingly fertile, like the island of
the Chalcidians, having soils which were easily denuded by agriculture.
Ecologists know well the Mediterranean soils, like those of Attica where
Athens was built, and the story they have to tell. They are now red,
being given the name of "terra rosa." This is the red of minerals
weathered under a mild climate. But once, in their forested antiquity,
the soils were probably brown, because they were well mixed with the
humus and leaf litter of the forest above. Good agricultural soils need
such an admixture of humus. But the people of Attica cleared the
forests, burned off the brush, plowed the land, took away the crops to
eat in their villages, and let the burning sun of the Mediterranean dry
the soils so that wind and water could sweep the humus away. The fertile
brown color went, and the unproductive red mineral mass of the terra
rosa remained. This was the result of the first intensive agriculture in
Attica, and the Greeks themselves understood the cause. A sentence in
Plato reads, "all the rich, soft soil has molted away, leaving a country
of skin and bones."
But the poorness of the soils of Attica seemed to have helped the
trading side of colonial life to grow with particular energy. Athenian
men of business concentrated on taking from their own land only what it
would yield easily, which happened to be olive oil and silver, and they
proceeded to build ships so that they could trade these commodities for
the other things they needed. There was no living for farmers any
more, except for the few who tended the olive trees, because the
people's grain was now grown by barbarians in the Ukraine, and the
people had to crowd near the granaries in Athens and become the servants
of manufacture. There were now rich and poor in Attica as there had never been before. (pp. 119-121)
In addition to colonization and trade, there was also military conquest,
both as a way of increasing niche space and of controlling population
growth. The most celebrated practitioner of this was Sparta:
In addition to colonies and trade as answers to the needs of growing
numbers, there is the expedient of direct conquest and elimination of
neighbors. In a nation which had invented such a clinically effective
instrument of compulsion as the phalanx, this expedient was sure to be
tried, and it was. The most celebrated exponent of this art of
neighborly aggression was Sparta. But aggression on neighbors meant
fighting other Greeks who also knew the effectiveness of lines of
armored spearmen. Spartans could not have the technical superiority
over fellow Greeks which made it so easy to force other nations to yield
for Greek colonies, and had to develop a society organized around the needs for absolute military efficiency in order to prevail. (p. 121)
About those Spartans:
Spartan discipline is legendary. But it is important to note that it was
the well born youths who were trained to this asceticism in war. In
battle, the hoplite shield wall held by young men of good Spartan
families was supported in the rear by up to eight ranks of helots, or
slaves, who passed forward spare weapons. It was this perfection of
armored warfare from Sparta against which Herodotus tells us the Persian
waves of infantry broke at Plataea, and it was this philosophy of war
which drove Leonidas to make his last stand with the three hundred All
this Spartan excellence in war was clearly and directly the achievement
of the ruling class and in its own interest.
Both the Spartan military society and the commercial society of
Athens worked by compressing the niches of the mass; specialized labor
was needed, often dull, repetitive, mechanical, soulless labor. It
must be performed by people whose ancestors, only a few generations
back, were free farmers; and in a world where free, farming, barbarian
societies still existed on all sides. Freedom beckoned in memory and by example. So the proper functioning of the state required compulsion.
The poverty of people with compressed lives, which is always the result
of letting populations rise to soak up the resources released by new
technology or conquest, took on the special institutionalized form of
slavery. A slave was merely a poor man made to keep quiet about his inevitable lot by physical coercion. (pp. 121-122)
All of this meant that the Greeks were both pressed by the weight of
numbers, and had developed the superior techniques in warfare that
allowed them to dominate their neighbors:
The Greek city states had already, by the time of the Persian wars,
found themselves in another of the dilemmas of growing numbers and
ambition—depopulation of the countryside at the same time that the towns
became crowded. This is a normal consequence of growth...As people
better themselves by the trade and industry of the city, so it often
happens that the city comes to support itself on the products of that
trade. It may well be that the city even comes to meet its basic needs,
as for food, from regions other than its own original hinterland.
This will be particularly so if the city begins to trade with fertile
agricultural states whose lower standards of living let them sell food
to the city cheaply. The result is neglect of the ancestral countryside
and an even more rapid drift of the country people into the cities...The
Greek historian Thucydides saw the working of this process when he
noted that Athens and Corinth were "crowded" and had to feed their
people with grain imported from the Ukraine. Notice that he was not
using the word "crowded" to connote wretchedness, for he thought of all
the well-to-do people of these very great cities as part of the crowd.
The people were living on Ukrainian land which fed them, and on all the
coasts with which they traded, so they had ample resources, though
"crowded."
Interestingly, Thucydides did not think Sparta to be "crowded" in this
way, though he notes that the Spartans did import their food from
Sicily. Sparta's land empire apparently left its people less densely
concentrated, though she too was living on the produce of other people's
real estate.
So the individual city-states of Greece each grew out of barbarism
through settlement, manufacture, trade, colonies and dense
concentrations of urban people to an eventual dependence on imported
food for the large numbers of their proletariat even as predicted by the
ecological hypothesis. The wealthier ranks of their societies took to
war as they tried to expand and defend their broad niches, and they
invented advanced techniques of fighting, particularly stressing body
armor. They formed confederations of cities to meet attacks from the
powerful, especially when their expansions into Asia provoked attacks by
imperial Persian armies. The hypothesis predicts next that increasing
demands made upon each city government would result in such wars that
the different parts of the growing nation will come under strong central
rule and loose its armies toward imperial conquests of its own. All
this was about to happen.(pp. 122-124)
These were the conquests of Alexander the Great, which we have already
covered. The Greek peoples took that huge population and military
superiority, and used it to defeat the Persian Empire, establishing a
world empire in the process (other Greeks such as Croesus of Lydia, who
invented coinage, had made earlier failed attempts).
Indeed, before the Mediterranean episode, we could speak of the "Near
Eastern Episode" which arose from the beginnings of agriculture in the
Fertile Crescent, and included the first empires such as the Sumerians
and Akkadians, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Egyptians, the
Hittites, the Hyksos, the Phoenicians, and finally the Medes and the
Persians whom Alexander conquered. It would have been nice to analyze
these empires from the point of view of the ecological hypothesis.
Interestingly, Toynbee notes that Egypt managed to survive culturally
for so long by the "fossilization" of their culture. Also worth noting
is the flooding of the Nile as a protection against erosion, something
that was not possible in the Near East (where floods did not coincide
with planting), Greece, or North Africa (which needed to be heavily
irrigated).
Meanwhile, the agricultural villages of the Italian peninsula were moving in their own direction:
Civilization was progressing in Italy, no less than in Greece, but it
was influenced by the long secluded shape of Italy. There was no
scarcity of good agricultural land in this long peninsula, so the
Italians had less need to turn to the sea for trade or conquest.
Populations could grow for a long time with no more than the local
adjustment of borders between tribal states. Then the states which
deemed themselves the most worthy resorted to the usual armed aggression
against their immediate neighbors. Techniques of land warfare were
developed early and earnestly; the primitive infantry phalanx of armored
spearmen probably appeared in Italy as early as it had appeared in
Greece, and when Italian fought Italian it was to jab this deadly
instrument against another equally deadly. And yet the military
evolution of Italy went neither in the direction of the Spartan absolute
expertise in conventional war to the ultimate development of the
phalanx into the terrible instrument of Macedon, but into something
quite different, the legion. (p. 131)
The legion proved to be the decisive military weapon in establishing the
Roman empire. The major rival to Rome in the Mediterranean theater was
thassalocracy of Carthage, founded by the Phoenicians. Like any trading
regime, they had developed expertise in war. Yet hemmed in on the coast
of North Africa, with vast deserts to the interior, they developed along
different lines than Rome. Colinvaux's insights on the development of
Carthaginian civilization and the wars are particularly interesting:
Carthage was in a fertile place, but there was not much of it. The
people could not win more resources by aggression on neighbors, for the
neighbors held only desert. Instead, the Carthaginians took the
approach of the green revolution, terracing and irrigating the land they
had, making their narrow strip between the desert and the sea so green
with crops that it was eventually to be the marvel of Roman visitors.
But when their growing civilization needed more opportunity, a broader
niche for the more enterprising, there was no way of meeting the need in
their narrow patch of land. Logic says that trade and then colonies
were the only practicable ways to provide for Carthage an expanded way
of life. We know that these solutions were, in fact, used to the extent
that they became a national way of life. The Carthaginians lived by
trade westward, where there seem to have been few trade rivals, leaving
their mark round Africa almost as far as the equator, and round Spain to
reach northern Europe. And they planted colonies in barbarian lands as
the Greek cities did.
But they did not develop an advanced technology of war. Carthaginians
had few civilized states with which to fight, none alongside their home
city, few near the barbarian lands which they expropriated for colonies.
Good weapons, good armor, good courage, and the shield-wall approach of
the primitive phalanx were all that were needed to secure the colonial
lands of their earlier expansion. Carthaginians were not tried by
earlier expansion. Carthaginians were not tried by civil war early
enough to force them to give pride of place to military technology as
the Greeks and Romans had had to do. Carthage had fine fleets, as befitted a trading state, but an indifferent army. When the real ecological wars came, this was to be her undoing.
So we have a nation of ambitious merchants and ebullient seamen, of
wealth from trade to patronize arts and material things, of high
consumption, of safe, confident, well-fed families. The numbers of
people in this nation must surely grow, nor will the new sons be content
with less than what their parents had. The Carthaginians were going to
feel the need for yet more land overseas. We have no state statistics,
no census, to tell us that the Carthaginian numbers did grow, but
there is evidence enough that they must have grown in what the
Carthaginians did: trade, colonies, and, at the last, outright attempts
at foreign conquest. It was then that their vital interests first
clashed with those of Rome.
Roman authors, and our school books, tell the tale of these wars as a
struggle to see which state should be mistress of the world; Rome, with
all Italy already in its power, or the trading city of Carthage,
sweeping the Mediterranean Sea with merchants and fleets. Rome did
indeed go on to conquer and enslave every nation within reach of its
terrible legions. But the war was not over who should be "mistress." It
was a struggle for raw survival by the civilized folk of a trading
state against the resources and weapons of a continental power. I
suggest that the good guys lost. (pp. 135-137)
We know what happened next as the three
Punic Wars for control of the Mediterranean:
Then were to be fought three great wars; Punic Wars as the Roman authors
call them. The first was a long war of attrition over the ownership of
colonial lands. In the second war, Hannibal crossed the Alps with his
elephants, and the third war ended with the annihilation of the
Carthaginian state and people.(p. 137)
Once Carthage was defeated, its land and possessions, including the
silver mines in Spain. came under the possession of the Romans. The
Roman war machine, forged during those Punic wars, allowed it to expand
and take over the previous empires and run the entire Mediterranean was a
giant free trade zone, creating plentiful niche space for their people:
Once the Italians under Roman government had taken Sicily, and all that
had belonged to Carthage, they must have had all the land and resources
which their people would need for several generations. Circumstantial
evidence supports this. It became Roman policy, for instance, to settle
their veteran soldiers with their families on farms in various parts of
Italy; a tactic useful to Rome because it helped forestall possible
rebellion from former enemy city states, as well as contenting such
potentially dangerous citizens as veteran soldiers.
But it also suggests that there was land to spare for making new farms;
the population had not yet expanded to fill up the space made available
by conquest of barbarian lands. Yet social habits do not easily change.
The free citizens of Rome, which meant the rulers and the middle class
of a slave-owning state, had created an army and invented an unbeatable
military technique because they needed to go to war to support their
standard of life. Now the need was, for a time, assuaged. But the
instrument was made and the habits for war were made too. Foreign wars
had proved an excellent way of finding opportunity for Roman rulers,
soldiers and merchants; they gave promise to the younger sons. War also
made the proletariat happy with glory and loot, and it brought regular
supplies of slaves to support middle class living, as well as plunder,
which could be taxed. War was the great provider of niche-space to those
in power at Rome; this is the explanation for the rapidity of the Roman
conquests of all the Mediterranean lands which was to follow. (p. 151)
Aggressive war became a way of life, and the Roman Empire seemed to be eternal to the people living under it:
Carried on by the weight of tradition, which now decreed that aggressive
war was a way of Roman life, the unbeatably deadly legions were then
thrust in all directions as far as they could be supported by the
logistic techniques and the communications of the times. It took only a
matter of decades to do this until the Roman Empire, as we Know it on
the maps, was made.
These immense possessions stolen for the Roman people by the legions now
gave extraordinary possibilities for the Roman way of life. Much of the
Empire, the whole of what is now France for instance, had been used
only for barbarian living, a pleasant enough way of life but one which
ensured that populations would be much lower than could be sustained
from city granaries and advanced agriculture. Here was room for the
younger sons to found new estates of their own; there was land to be
made into farms for old soldiers back from the wars. Even with a
bounding birth rate, it would be some generations before the pinch of
land hunger would be felt. The Roman niche could broaden and the Roman
numbers could grow for some time without serious consequence or worry. This
is the fundamental reason why the Roman Empire lasted so long. The
Romans were more fortunate than the Greeks of Alexander's day who had
used their military superiority only to conquer filled-up civilized
lands, where there was little room to expand.
But Rome owned this vast territory only because her field army was
unbeatable by any military force then in existence. Alexander had been
able to spread the Greek way of life among the people he conquered
because their experience of earlier civilization told them it was good. But the city ways did not seem good to free barbarians bludgeoned into the Roman state. The
expanding Romans of the expanding Roman niche took away the means for
barbarian living, as surely as the European farmers of North America
made it impossible for an American Indian to live a stone age life.
Again and again, people driven to despair turned on the occupiers, even
though it always meant they would be butchered by a legion in the end.
And the turmoil, in great possessions held only by force, meant that the
Romans had to leave their government to those who wielded the military
power. Via civil war and temporary arrangements the once free Roman constitution fell, as it had to, beneath central dictatorship. (pp. 152-154)
Everywhere the power of irresistible military force prevailed until at
last there came an imposed and universal peace in the lands round the
Mediterranean Sea, and it happened that a succession of clever and
well-meaning men, the Antonines, became emperors of Rome. Under the
Antonines Rome entered what is said to have been a golden age, a time of
flourishing prosperity and universal order, a time to which many
historians still look back with a longing tinged with nostalgia.
The lands round the Mediterranean Sea were set apart from the rest of
the world by a ring of legions, who stood to their frontier posts like a
dike restraining the stormy sea of barbarians outside. And, within the
dike, there was a common law, a common currency, straight, paved roads, a
central waterway free from pirates, and a system of banks and credits
which let commerce, industry and agriculture flourish. It seemed to
citizens of those times, as it seems to citizens of the modern
prosperous States of the West, that the way had been found to the
perpetuation, and even improvement, of the good life for all forever. (pp. 155-156)
We already covered some of the signs of collapse dictated by the
ecological hypothesis - increasing bureaucracy, increasing taxes on the
middle class, budget deficits, imperial overreach, elite overproduction
and jockeying for power, stagnant living standards for the majority,
depopulation of the countryside, urbanization, restlessness, distraction
via welfare and entertainment industries (bread and circuses),
political repression and a police state, inflation, debasing the
currency, shortages of basic goods, political corruption and
self-serving behavior, privatization of the commons, massive gaps
between rich and poor, lack of social mobility, establishment of caste
systems, civil wars, mass immigration, and so forth:
And so I offer a new explanation for the decline and fall of the Roman
Empire. Resources that could be extracted by contemporary technique from
the lands the Empire held were not sufficient to offer the broad niche
of the middle-class life of a Mediterranean city-state to very many. Rising
numbers held within the Empire in cities were a drain on what little
economic surplus the Empire could produce, both from the direct needs of
welfare payments and from the costs of the police apparatus needed to
control these masses in poverty. There was neither the hope nor the
surplus wealth needed for a large army of high-technology soldiers, as
there had been in the days of the old Greek and Roman republics when the
expansion started. The defenses of the long frontiers faltered and
then distant peoples, needing land rather than civilization, pressed
their war bands equipped with contemporary armament into the border
provinces.
Although the Empire of the West was struck down by force of arms in
this way, the real defeat can still be read in terms of breeding
strategy, numbers, and niche. The growth of Greek and Roman
city-states into an empire was fueled by expanding niche and the promise
of more. The resulting empire filled with people until the promise of
expanding niche could not be met—a direct consequence of the Roman
failure to develop techniques which could extract resources fast enough
to provide large niches for many. In this sense, the Empire was
crowded, and the fact that there were thinly settled provinces is
irrelevant. Having relapsed into a police state with very high
maintenance costs, the Empire found it hard to defend itself. And it
fell.
As the Roman empire declined, the barbarians, needing new land came and took it over:
With the Roman power gone, the Gothic tribes spread into every country
on the European side of the Mediterranean. Some even crossed into
Africa. They came with their wives and children to stay, a mass
migration of people, for they were under the pressure of crowding in
their traditional lands. These traditional lands, in turn, were being
pressed upon by other overcrowded barbaric and nomadic peoples from the
central Asian steppes. The need for land by these technocratic Gothic
barbarians in the suits of armor was apparently overwhelmingly great and
they found it in the territories which had once been Roman.
They found some land thinly populated because abandoned in strife, or
because it was awkwardly placed to supply the needs of cities. Other
lands had few people because given over to cattle raising, which needs
only a small local population of animal caretakers. The really good
farmlands were organized to feed distant cities and so were lived on by
populations much smaller than those they actually fed. All these lands the barbarians could settle and use directly, leaving the Roman townsfolk to privation. (pp. 175-177)
The empty and depopulated lands of the former Roman Empire were ripe for the picking by the new peoples of the frontier:
The barbarians had come to live in a barbaric way, but they found that
they had conquered countries laid out for the life of settled
agriculture, and with fine buildings which it was sometimes tempting to
use. For generations their ancestors had been able to see what Rome had,
and sometimes to plunder a little of it for themselves. Now all was
theirs. They began to settle on their conquests rather than to wander
around them. And they had, from the start, to fight to keep what they
had won lest it be taken from them by other barbarians, like the Huns,
pressing on their heels from a population crush in the steppes to the
east. Their armored horsemen found themselves defending the very lines
which the legions had once held. And behind the new dike of mailed
horsemen they began forging the Christian and feudal kingdoms out of
which were to grow the modern civilization of the West.
But in North Africa things were very different. The fertile grain fields
which had once fed the city of Rome were but patches of land on the
edge of vast and unproductive deserts. And in the deserts and
semideserts in a great arc of land, from the edge of the empire in Asia
to the Atlantic Ocean, were the wandering barbarian tribes who had
always lived there. These people had pressed hard upon their resources
since long Carthage, and their ways of life had changed very little.
They were always warlike, because the necessities for life were so
scarce that they must ever be ready to defend what they had. But they
had never been able to develop anything like the formidable weaponry of
the barbarians north of Rome, nor, indeed, any military technology
beyond that suited for the swift raid across the desert.
They traveled light on nimble horses, without armor, and fought in swift
onslaughts when the blood was up, with lances and swords. They had
never been able to stand against the regular soldiers of Rome, or
Carthage before her, though they had been a nuisance to both states and
had also sometimes been employed by both as auxiliary cavalry, They
seemed in no condition to do with the Roman Empire of the south what the
armored Gothic barbarians had done to the Roman Empire of the north.
Yet the crowding of some of these people into wretchedness in the
country of Arabia was preparing the way for fresh aggressive wars of
conquest with results no less remarkable. (pp. 179-180)
The eruption of warriors from the desert, which Muhammad uncorked
like a genie from his Arabian bottle, was yet another of the wars of
aggression started because the people needed land. There seems to
have been no new military technology behind this aggression; the
faithful merely fought as clouds of gallant horsemen, as they had always
done. But then there was no longer a phalanx or a legion in North
Africa to withstand them. As the Arabians began to succeed, the tribes
of all the deserts joined them, with what perhaps may be best described
as holy glee. The Christian populous societies of the fertile patches
along the coast had not the spirit, or the organized purpose, to stand
against this deliberate fury. They were conquered, oppressed, enslaved,
and sometimes subjected to that final solution of "being driven out."
Their onetime resources went to support the swelling numbers and
swelling desires of the people who had embraced this new niche called
"Islam." In about a century all the former African possessions of Rome
were in the power, and under the command, of the once barbarians of the
desert, who were taking over the settlements in their own way and
building from them an entirely new civilization. (pp. 181-182)
After Leo had defended Constantinople and Charles had defended France,
the Mediterranean Sea became a division between the Moslem peoples of
North Africa and the Christian peoples of Europe. Both civilizations
were to develop in their own way, and although they were often to fight
one another, the essential boundary between their lands was never
changed. The peoples round that land-locked sea would never again be
linked by common laws and common languages. The Mediterranean Episode
was over. (pp. 183-184)
I'm kind of surprised he does not mention the Crusades, which seems to
confirm the hypothesis--Europe was undergoing a huge youth population
bulge at the time during the High Middle Ages, all of the lands that
could be settled were settled, and it's generally accepted historical
fact that the ambitions of younger prices, who did not inherit the lands
as their older brothers did, was a driving force in answering the
Pope's call to conquer the lands of the "infidels."
The next chapter presents an interesting hypothesis. It has long been
known that periodic waves of nomadic horsemen have overrun settled
civilizations since ancient times. The settled agricultural
civilizations of the ancient Near East, those of Ancient Greece, the
empires of China, and the Islamic empires have all faced down these
waves. It is a major factor in world history.
We know most about the attacks which were most recent, about those of
the Mongols and their Genghis Khan and his successors between six and
seven hundred years ago... But we have evidence for the intermittent
eruption of nomad armies from the steppes for as far back as our written
records show...The afflictions seemed to come in waves, there being a
few generations when the soldiers of civilized states had to fight
again and again for the existence of their countries against armies of
people who appeared from regions beyond the knowledge of their geography.
A century or two of repose would follow, when the wounded civilizations
could rebuild their shattered confidence and shattered frontiers, or win
back the border territories which the horsemen had entirely taken from
them...To Europeans the main floods of the last three thousand years
have been associated with the names of Scythians, Sarmatians, Huns,
Magyars and Mongols, though there were many other tribes and races
involved in the mass movements...
The sense of periodicity...is even more striking when the history of
assaults on China and India is compared with it. They too were struck by
Mongols, Huns and the rest, and at the same time. The great lozenge of
land which is the Eurasian steppe stretches all the way from China to
Europe, having a frontier with each great center of civilization in
turn. It is a single geographic feature; as it were, a giant piece of
real estate jointly owned by an assembly of nomadic tribes...Yet the cyclic ebb and flow of armies coming out of the steppes is apparently real, requiring an explanation. (pp. 186-189)
Some have argued that these waves of conquest were due to climatic
fluctuations - warmer and wetter years on the steppe led to expansion
and the establishment of empires. Colinvaux rejects this answer. Yet his
explanation does involve climate--in a way.
Colinvaux argues that these periodic waves are due to a breeding
strategy on the part of the steppe nomads. When years were good, people
adjusted their breeding strategy and had more children. When the climate
of the steppe turned sour and times got tough, these warlike people,
accustomed to techniques of fighting among themselves and able to live
off the land effectively, took to their horses to seek out new lands to
conquer.
Colinvaux sees the perfect analogy for this periodic overrunning of
settled civilizations in the breeding habits of one particular animal -
the arctic rodent known as the
lemming, which goes through periodic bursts of population and then fades away until the next population explosion:
Nomads of the Asian steppes lived under conditions and in ways which
give a distant echo of the lemmings. They were adapted to life where
there were no trees and where there was a long hard winter. They were
dependent on their animals for food, transport, clothing, and even for
the covering of their houses. They managed quick crops of grain when the
rains came. They learned to wander far with the changing seasons, to
distant pastures, to water holes. In their wanderings they were able to
live off their animals, which were a moving commissariat and larder, and
on grain, carried in sacks and saddle bags...
Yet the nomad niche on the steppes was one that could not support dense
populations. They ate meat and a little corn, both depending on the poor
productivity of the steppes for forage and grain. Niche-spaces must
usually have been at a premium on the steppes. So we have a chronic
shortage of niche-spaces and an abundant supply of young adults to
compete for them; few jobs and many applicants, the nomad cultures must
have ways of allotting niche-spaces to some and denying them to
others...
But the fortunes of such people were critically dependent on the
weather, particularly on the amount and timing of the seasonal rains.
There are wet years and dry years on the steppes, as the weather changes
with that characteristic unpredictability which we all know so
well...Because the rains were fickle, however, the niche that the people
of the steppes had learned must be adapted to cope with bad years and
good. ..and all the tribes would be over huge areas at once, and all the
tribes would be affected equally; they would all wander less in a good
year, more in a bad...The breeding strategy of these nomad people would
reflect, in detail, this niche of nomad living. Each couple would raise
the optimum number of children that they could carry with them and
nurture through the lean season. This optimum would certainly be a large
number. The nomad niche held none of the restraints that make the
wealthy of civilized states opt for small families, nor did nomads feel
the privations of poor agricultural peasants or people in city slums who
cannot afford to raise many children...
All that is needed to produce a surplus of nomads across all the steppes
at the same time is for some run of seasons to encourage societies
everywhere to let in a few more adults, because these extra couples
would each rear a new family. Perhaps a chance run of good years would
do this simply by letting the people wander less so that friction
between distant tribes was less, or it could be simply that the herds
grew, the mares gave more milk, and the grain sacks were filled. But any
small change in habit that let the average recruitment to the tribe at
puberty be slightly more generous, would ensure that the steppe would be
crowded in the years ahead—especially if the new laxer habits were not
easily abandoned...
In this way the whole steppe would start filling with too many
people, synchronously, because habit was triggered by weather just as
the tundra of large areas can fill with lemmings. People grow and
reproduce more slowly than lemmings, and the chances of weather that
affect them take longer to work themselves out. That a nomad high should
happen only every five hundred years or so by these means seems
reasonable.
Population highs of nomads must now be translated into armies of
aggression, which is easy. Nomadic people fight over pastures and water
holes anyway; more nomads on the move means more fighting in bad years;
more fighting means better attention to weapons and generals; and this
means the chance of raising a real army. (pp. 197-200)
Population cycles of steppe-people as well as of lemmings are thus
synchronized by weather, although they are definitely not caused by
cycles in climate. Both lemmings and people use weather as cues for
behavior, the lemmings for simple sex, the people more subtly. All
people behave to suit the weather but pastoral nomads are more closely
tied to weather than the rest of us so that small changes in habit bring
large consequences in population.
Yet the climatic pattern of good years and bad is purely random, for
both people and lemmings. The length of time between one population high
and the next is, for both species, set by how fast each can breed, how
long each lives, and how prompt each is to respond to changes in the
weather. Lemmings can raise a baby in six weeks, live a year, and
produce huge populations at roughly four-year intervals. People take
twenty years to raise a baby, live sixty years, and produce largish
populations roughly every five hundred years. The cycles are thus properties of the animals, not of climate.
When there are too many lemmings on the tundra, the surplus must die, or
fail to breed, so that the excess crop is removed. The same is true for
nomads. Surplus nomads are spent as they follow their great captain
in his armies to pitch their tents in border lands once held by
civilized states. The steppes are relieved of their surplus people and
nomadism there may revert to its traditional ways...Fighting is no
longer so necessary to the stay-at homes and the martial needs of the
people which made them submit to the triumphant discipline of their
generals can be relaxed. This explains the ebb tide of nomad
conquests...In this way does the ecological hypothesis provide a
rational explanation for the periodic wars of conquest undertaken by
nomadic peoples... (pp. 202-203)
The nomad armies were never beaten. In the end they merely faded away.
Like the decline of more conventional empires, this has often been seen
by moralists as the result of a loss of spiritual purpose in the
descendants of the conquerors. They grow soft, take to loose living,
wallow in their harems, and forget that the martial graces are supposed
to be superior. But such moralizing is not necessary to explain the ebb
of the Mongol aggressions. The need, which had caused the people to
throw up that dreadful army, had been satisfied. The wars had first
diverted the frustrations of a rather crowded people with adventure and
plunder, and then had removed the cause of those frustrations entirely
by effecting an armed emigration. (p.210)
Colinvaux includes a chapter commenting on the American Revolution. His
description of differing concepts of "freedom" - those of settled,
crowded civilizations, and those of a wide open frontier are worth
considering:
That England was an island state, densely populated, but with both numbers and opportunities for life expanding. The English had turned their island into a productive garden, with little wildness left. Agriculture,
industry and commerce were each collecting into large scale
enterprises. It was a society in which the younger sons of the
better-off were already taking to trade and foreign adventure, achieving
broad niches by the use of other people's lands. And the people had
fashioned lies of law and government suited to their tightly organized
garden of an island.
The niches in which these English people lived reflected the organization of their developed state. The
English who stayed at home expected their futures to be narrowly
circumscribed. There was a place for each in society, but little choice
of place. It was a society of castes, liberal by the standards of many a caste system, but a society of master and man nevertheless.
Yet the English were thriving on the new developments in agriculture and
industry. The optimum family size was large for all classes and the
population tended to grow rapidly. This rise in the numbers of the
English is well documented. The English themselves knew what was
happening, and they were alarmed lest their prosperity might be
undermined thereby. Contemporary writers set down the dilemma and one of
them, Richard Eburne, showed that salvation was to be found in the mass
export of people to colonies.
The English in America brought with them that English concept of freedom
under the law, complete with deference to authority and restrictions on
behavior appropriate to life in a full-up island laid out like a
garden. American elders read of the island life, some were homesick for
it, and others learned about it from the regular flow of immigrants who
brought it with them. But the way of life, the niche, found to be so
satisfactory for England was not so appropriate to Englishmen in
America. Why accept the social system which had been found necessary for
a well-peopled garden? Here there was room for everyone to do as they
pleased, respecting their neighbor perhaps, but not neatly fitted into a
neighbor's affairs as the English in England were. Why be master and
man when there was room for everybody to be master? A new form of
liberty was possible in which each could pursue happiness with much less
deference to vested interest. Gradually the niche of an American took shape, described though it was in the language of England.
Niche faced niche across the British muskets in Boston; a niche suited
for a crowded island and a niche suited to the almost unlimited
possibilities of a new continent. Both peoples used the words "freedom"
and "liberty" when they described their purpose, and, hence, the niches
they were to preserve. But the British talked of the regulated
freedom of a complex society wherein choice was necessarily limited by
the numbers of other people needing their shares, and the Americans
talked of the much wider freedom possible when opportunity and resource
were virtually unlimited. (pp. 219-223)
Indeed, we see this in the rallying cry of "freedom" in the United
States - the freedom to consume as much as we want and to do as we
please, everyone else be damned. It's worth noting that America's period
of imperial colonial expansion--the Spanish-American War--occurred
almost immediately after the frontier was declared "closed" and
"settled." And when that was no longer possible, we entered the
technological "frontier" - the vast expansion of niche space through the
development of technological marvels such as electricity and the
internal combustion engine. Frederick Jackson Turner's "
Frontier Thesis" is an elucidation of these ideas.
After World War Two, America alone was the global superpower, able to
divert a quarter of the world's resources to itself while the rest of
the industrial powers were reduced to rubble. As Morris Berman points
out, Americans have always had some sort of frontier and are conditioned
to rising living standards in perpetuity, unlike other cultures. This
gives a great insight into the American character.
Americans are now freaking out because rising numbers mean that we can
no longer do as we please. As numbers rise, new bureaucracy crops up to
deal with rising numbers. Social mobility--long considered a
birthright--stagnates and degenerates into a rigid caste system
(enforced today by the university-educational complex). Americans are
living in smaller houses, turning down the thermostats, driving smaller
cars, and tightening their belts, all while being told that their
wastefully obscene living standards are unsustainable, as indeed they
are. This is leading to recrimination and blame, as numerous conspiracy
theories such as
"Agenda 21" can attest. It is not conspiracy,
but the fact of rising numbers, and other nations finally being able to
contest for those resources.
Now, frustrated American are aghast at the possibility that may have to
live like "Europeans," in apartment blocks without acre-size lawns and
riding lawnmowers (i.e. like the rest of the world). They occupy
government buildings to protest "tyranny" of having to pay grazing fees
to use public land. They stockpile guns and ammunition to defend their
"freedom." and use them to menace government officials who come to
install energy-efficient smart meters. They balk diverting funds to
public transportation rather than expansive freeways for private
automobiles, denouncing this as "socialism." They belch coal smoke from
their oversized vehicles to protest the adoption of energy efficiency
measures and solar power. Politicians constantly rail against taxes and
regulations that people of other nations simply see as their civic duty,
while fulminating about "freedom" and "liberty."
Is it any wonder that it is primarily Americans who are are devoted to
the idea of someone coming up with a solution to all of the world's
problems
via some sort of technology developed "in their garage," or with getting off "this rock" and colonizing Mars and outer space?
If there is a major flaw in this portion of the book, it is his focus on
Western civilizations to the detriment of Eastern cultures, especially
China. This most likely is because the book was published in 1980,
coincidentally around the same time as the beginning of China's rise to
world power status. Because of this, much less was commonly known about
China's ancient history by Westerners and there was less scholarship on
this point, which is probably why Colinvaux does not devote much
discussion to it.
Which is too bad, because China's history is an even greater
confirmation of his ecological hypothesis. China has always acutely felt
the weight of rising numbers and crowding--indeed I would argue that
this is the central pivotal fact of Chinese history. China would
consistently bump against a civilizational plateau due to increasing
numbers, and would collapse down to a lower level. Unlike the West, they
were unable to break through this plateau through technology or
colonization; indeed China was famously insular and solipsistic. This
led to caste systems and cultural stagnation, as Colinvaux describes. In
fact, Ancient Chinese historians were among the first to describe their
history in terms of repeating cycles in books such as the
Shujing, or "
Classic of History."; describing what they called the "
Dynastic Cycle."
China's rise since 1980 has seen the ecological hypothesis playing out
in a nutshell: rising numbers, rapid growth and industrialization
creating new wealth and new niches, repressive government, abandonment
of the countryside and flight to the cities even as numbers increase
(slower in China due to the one-child policy), concentration of wealth,
and now, potentially, imperial expansion and diaspora. That fact that
China has tracked the ecological hypothesis so closely since the book
was written--something Colinvaux could not have foreseen in 1980--is an
impressive confirmation of the book's central thesis.
Another important omission is the impact of rising numbers on ecological
degradation and the use of fossil fuels and technology for growth,
which has been a central fact in world history since at least the
nineteenth century. This is odd, especially in a book purporting to use
ecology to explain the historical process (the passage above about
Athens is an exception). In his concluding chapter, however, Colinvaux
does address some of these issues.
In his concluding chapter, Colinvaux meditates on the ramifications for the future:
The human breeding strategy remains what it has always been. Each
breeding pair acts to maximize fitness, which we define as the number of
offspring who survive them to breed in the next generation. Fitness in
human breeding is largest when the chosen family is at an optimum, not
too large and not too small. But this optimum number is very sensitive
to the broadness of the niche to which the children are to be raised.
The relatively poor will always have larger families than the relatively rich.
The experience of history is that the average family that results is
more than is needed to replace the parents, even among the affluent. The
only circumstance in which families fall below replacement is in the
more extreme forms of poverty, where resources are so constrained that
the optimum number falls to below two.
Populations tend to rise most quickly following a large increase in
resources or standards of living brought on by a major technical advance
or a successful aggression. This is because the optimum family then can
be seen to be large by people of most standards of affluence, but
particularly by those being recruited from the poor to the middle
classes. The spurt in numbers always ends when the new resources, won by
technique or conquest. are used up; after which the population
continues to increase, but more slowly. Many modern nations have just passed through, or are still in, one of these periods of rapidly increasing numbers.
There is an important variant on the effect of fresh resources on the
optimum family. It is that hope, alone and by itself, will raise the
number of children chosen. Any reason for rising hope in a population
always leads, therefore, to rising numbers...hope itself will lead to
larger families. This is inherent in our breeding strategy...A feeling of well-being makes the numbers rise.
Rising numbers must always soak up spare resources by sharing them
out among the extra people. One consequence of this is that poverty
always persists. A second consequence is that good times for the
not-so-poor must always end in some successor generation producing a
predictable series of events which include trade, colonialism, class
repression and aggressive war. Since our own numbers will continue to
grow, it is inevitable that our own future holds variants on these
themes. (pp. 318-319)
As noted earlier, Colinvaux dismisses the idea of the "demographic transition."
This point is critical,
because the idea that charging full steam ahead with massive
industrialization in order to bring the developing world up to
exorbitant Western living standards is seen as the silver bullet to the
overpopulation crisis by the so-called "Bright Green" or "Ecomodernist"
movements. This idea is heavily promoted by those who have a stake in
promoting "pro-growth" policies, such as governments, bankers,
businessmen, corporations, and wealthy elites (The
Davos crowd).
See, they argue,
growth solves it's own problems!!
Colinvaux would surely regard such people as utterly delusional. Rising living standards cause people to have
more
children, not less, as noted above. Wealthier couples may have less
children on average, but it does not mean that populations will stop
growing altogether. Since wealthier people consume more anyway,
increasing wealth to stop population growth seems like a self-defeating
strategy if you want to deal with resource use or carbon emissions.
It is true that a number of wealthy countries are experiencing stagnant,
or even falling population growth rates. It is possible that the root
cause of this is the pinched living standards of the younger generations
caused by crowding, extreme income inequality, and increased economic
competition due to globalism. Europeans, for example, would consider the
conditions under which many children and adults live in places like
Sub-Saharan Africa or Latin America as unacceptable (this is less true
of America, hence it's higher growth rates). This is leading them to
delay, or even forego, staring families at all,
because children are seen as simply "unaffordable" for younger couples.
A tradeoff is perceived between having children and maintaining an
affluent Western standard of living, with its self-actualization
opportunities, leisure time, and consumption patterns. Social and
religious taboos against not getting married or having children have
also been relaxed.
This was not the case in the past, where Europeans were either poorer or
richer on average. There seems to be a strange national "middle-income
trap," where most people are rich enough to care about their children's
prospects, but not rich enough to guarantee both themselves and their
children a bright future anymore without painful sacrifices. Western
societies tend to make children an economic burden, rather than a
necessity, which they are seen as in places where the family structure
is still intact, work is more informal, and there is no social safety
net nor old-age pensions. Subsidies to parents promoted by political
elites are having little effect, because the subsidies cannot offset the
costly educational burdens for the few jobs which pay decent wages, nor
the soaring housing costs and stagnant incomes. All of these are
consequences of crowding, and cannot be solved merely by government
meddling.
It is also thought that by empowering female education and mating
choice, birthrates will drop as well. There is some truth to this, but
it is often accompanied by Western cultural imperialism and a
destruction of traditional lifeways which have sustained people for
countless generations. These are replaced by Western-style "free
markets," where everyone is suddenly placed into competition with
everyone else in a "sink-or-swim" type environment. It makes no sense to
educate women if they simply displace men from the workforce causing
mass unemployment, which is what we've seen so far under corporate
globalism. As Colinvaux pointed out earlier, there need to be enough
niches for the newly educated people, otherwise there will just be
more
conflict, not less, as there are too many claimants for the available
niches. Thus increased education, including of women, before economic
development, can actually be
destructive. Educating women has
often been accompanied by a loss of wealth and prestige for men, leading
to extreme reactionary movements, the most extreme of which are the
Islamic State, the Taliban, and Boko Haram, all of whom are not
coincidentally opposed opposed to Western education (
Boko Haram even translates as roughly this).
It's also worth noting that areas outside the affluent West are still
growing very rapidly, and the crush of people is sending a tidal wave of
refugees, both political and economic, to the wealthy, Western
countries. These people all want to live in the broad niches that
Westerners currently occupy, with the conditions noted above. Immigrants
are being brought in to fill the undesirable narrow niches of Western
societies. With their traditional social structures, and unaccustomed to
Western wealth and comfort, their breeding strategy is to have as many
children as possible, displacing the native population and causing
social conflict. The migration crisis is utterly predicable from the
ecological hypothesis, although Colinvaux fails to predict it using his
own theory.
The assertion that spreading wealth will halt the growing populations is
a statement of what is called in the textbooks the "theory of the
demographic transition."...The idea does not have the status of a formal
theory, in spite of the name given to it. It is merely the observation,
now commonly made and well established, that more-affluent people have
smaller families than poorer people. This is explained by niche theory,
which truly is a theory and which explains the observation. There is
no evidence that making people wealthy will halt population growth,
merely that growth will be somewhat slower when we are all wealthy.
The way in which the demographic transition argument is often offered
makes it particularly dangerous to the human well-being. In its most
glib form it slides out as a sentence something like this, "We now know
that poverty is a cause of population growth and not a consequence." The
implication is that, if we will only get down to producing wealth and
sharing it with the poor, history will go away. But that glib sentence
is utterly false. It is based on nothing other than the belief that
there is some magic in being wealthy that sets the family at
replacement. A rising population is the cause of increased poverty;
niche theory predicts that it will be so; the historical record shows
that it always has been so. (p. 320)
He also dismisses medical advances as automatically putting a halt to population growth:
For a few years when first introduced, medical improvements probably do
cause a few more children to be raised in a single generation, because,
as I have said earlier, the families of that generation will have been
conceived in ignorance of the effects of the new medicine. The effect
has no long-term significance, except to let people plan their optimum
family with greater precision. But to assume that the recent
invention of mass medicine has made any fundamental difference to the
number of children raised in any contemporary society is to assign to
people the small-egg gambit of a mosquito; it is to assume that
women are mere baby factories and their output is a function of what the
doctors can keep alive. It is unscientific as well as literally
inhuman.(pp. 321-322)
And finally, there is the idea that there is some sort of magic
"inflection point" in human numbers, just as there is with mice or
bacteria, which will come about naturally and without much pain.
According to Colinvaux, this is to misunderstand history and the
breeding strategy of large animals such as humans:
This leaves the third assertion which can best be described as "the
doctrine of inflection in the growth curve." The argument goes like
this: the rate of growth of the human population is not so steep as it
was before; therefore, we may say that it is starting to "level off and
this looks like "the point of inflection" on the growth curve of small
animals in a laboratory experiment.
When you put healthy fruit flies, or flour beetles, or mice, or flesh
flies, in a suitable laboratory cage and give them all the food, water,
or bedding they need, they engage in healthy reproduction. The numbers
in the cage begin to grow...You put in fresh food and water daily, more
than enough for their needs, making every effort to keep them
comfortable. The population begins to grow more and more rapidly,
geometrically, exponentially, faster and faster and faster. The growth
curve by now looks like one of those horror charts of projected growth
of the human population from sensational "ecology" literature. And then
the rate curve levels off; there is indeed a point of inflection when
the population ceases to grow...It is to this history that we are
invited to compare the recent progress of the human population.
The laboratory populations "inflect" because their cages become so
crowded that the animals have to struggle for food; or because they no
longer have space for some of the vital activities of their niches; or
because they blunder into each other and bite by mistake; or because
they eat each other's eggs. These troubles interfere with the breeding
efforts of the animals...The birth rates go own because of privation, and the death rates go up through similar privation.
Is this what is happening to the human population? When the population
growth of mice in a cage finally stops, one of the things that happens
is that mothers eat their babies, definitely making the population
"inflect." The absurdity of comparing human history with this is obvious.
Many wild populations of animals, particularly the big ones to which we
relate most easily, seem to be constant from year to year, showing that
some ancient growth curve must have leveled off in circumstances less
drastic than those we engineer in a laboratory cage...The very last
individual for whom there is room is supported and no more individuals
can be recruited to the population. Extra individuals are always being
produced but the surplus are denied a chance to live. This is the only
scientific explanation of this kind of population stability that has
been found. Competition or predation removes surplus individuals when
all the living[sic] has been taken up by others. Any other explanation
invokes magic. (pp.322-323)
Given that so much of the book is devoted to military history, it is not
surprising that Colinvaux takes a look at the future prospects for war.
Since that the book was released at the height of the Cold War,
Colinvaux contemplates a possible nuclear exchange between the U.S. and
Soviet Union, and considers scenarios where this would be strategically
make sense (which thankfully did not happen). But he does describe the
circumstances in which he believes future wars are likely to occur:
The first requirement of aggression is a rising standard of living. Niches
of the ruling classes of the aggressive population have been getting
broader, requiring more and more resources for each person. The ruling
class will have worked to spread the new standards to poorer sections of
the community and there will have been a history of partial success for
this effort. More and more of the people will have been living
better...
A high standard of living always includes more chance to choose a path
in life and is, therefore, seen as a form of freedom. Aggressive armies
fight for loot to support a standard of living, but their spokesmen talk
of fighting in the cause of liberty...The belief that you are fighting for liberty is a second general requirement for a war of aggression.
A rising population is a third requirement. This condition will automatically be met when the standard of living is improving and there is a sense of greater freedom...
A fourth requirement is that much effort has already gone into
meeting the needs of the new freedoms by means less costly than
aggressive war...The potential aggressor...will have made good
progress at expanding its resources by technique in agriculture,
industry and government. It will have a strong merchant class...And it
will have communities of its own people dependent on providing or
consuming the goods of trade for their regular employment. In material
things, therefore, the aggressor state must already be comparatively
wealthy.
The fifth requirement, and an extremely important one, is that there must be a suitable victim.
The ideal victim is a society that is technologically backward by the
standards of the aggressor. It will thus have land and resources from
which the aggressors know that they can extract a higher standard of
living, possibly for more people than the victim did...
All aggressions are attempted from positions of apparent military superiority. This sixth requirement means that the aggressor usually has, not just a large army, but soldiers with superior technique...And
in all successful aggressions with lasting results, this requirement
has in fact meant that the attacking army has weapons or tactics which
are clearly superior to those of the victim and which the victim cannot
copy...There have been many aggressions in which the apparent military
superiority of the attacker turned out to be illusory...Aggression never
comes from a poor country against a rich country, except in very
special circumstances. It can happen that a nation appears poor by some
standards of measurement, but is wealthy by the test of its own
history...
It should be obvious that very many of the nations of the contemporary
world are growing in ways that must soon let them fit this profile of a
potential aggressor. Standards of life, hopes for liberty, and numbers
of the people are all rising together. Many nations show a strong
interest in military affairs. Whether they will actually go to war will
depend on their finding suitable victims. (pp. 324-328)
One is forced to consider the ramifications for China, a country which
has experienced a generation of rising living standards and is now
reaching the limits of providing new niches through economic growth and
trade. China has the world's largest army, the world's second largest
economy, has been making military threats over islands in the Pacific
and building carrier fleets, and is experiencing an economic slowdown.
India, soon to surpass China in population, has had numerous conflicts
with Pakistan, and both are nuclear powers.
While this is fundamentally sound, I question a few of the conclusions.
it is hard to see what the United States gained from many of its
aggressions, such as the Vietnam War of the Gulf Wars. The Gulf Wars can
at least be seen as a means to stabilize trade routes and secure the
price of the oil resource.
Which is a good segue into something I think Colinvaux missed:
trade is the new war. A society can now be looted simply by means of the economics of banking and debt, as
Michael Hudson has repeatedly pointed out and described in great detail.
Wars are expensive and costly, and with the deadliness of modern
weapons, it is very hard to conquer and hold territory anymore even for
the most powerful nations. Much of the "aggression" by the West has been
through economic means against places like Iran, Argentina, Mexico,
Greece and Venezuela, rather than outright war.
As Westerners left the colonies behind, they erected an economic system
which ensured that the vast resources of the so-called Third World would
continue to flow to them. The impoverished regions of Africa, Southeast
Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean continue to provide the goods and
raw materials which flow to the West and sustain our present
lifestyles. The Amazon rainforest is chopped down for American beef;
Indonesian forests are burned down to produce palm oil plantations for
Europe; Thai mangroves are destroyed to make shrimp farms, Latin
American farmers produce our coffee and chocolate, and African children
mine the rare earth elements needed for our smartphones and wind
turbines, all out of sight. War is no longer required. Political
corruption and repression in these societies keeps these "banana
republics" in line, and if some "socialist" leader even thinks of
tipping the apple cart and using some of the resources for his own
people, he is swiftly targeted with economic sanctions, followed by
clandestine assassination/coup attempts, and finally a carpet of bombs
dropped by Western air forces.
This use of economic warfare is missed by Colinvaux, probably because
1980, in addition to being the start of China's rise, was also the
beginning of Neoliberalism's (aka free market looting) rise to become
the dominant economic ideology of the West. It, too, can be seen as a
way for elites to open new opportunities (liberalized global trade and
buying up common-pool resources via the Shock Doctrine) and maintaining
their extravagant lifestyles which were under pressure from below, as
the crises of the Seventies showed. It certainly has worked: a handful
of people who could fit into a medium size conference room
now control as much wealth as half of the world's population.
Colinvaux discusses the "three great technologically prosperous
empires:" The United States, Europe, and the (former) Soviet Union. He
also focuses on mercantile island nations such as England and Japan.
This causes some of Colinvaux's predictions to go awry. I've already
noted he missed the rise of China (which follows from his own theories).
The salient point about the Soviet Union was not war, but collapse and
breakup. This, too, follows from the ecological hypothesis: it's likely
that there was no way to accommodate the rising aspirations of the
middle classes within the old, sclerotic Soviet bureaucracy. Political
repression can only go so far, and the enticements of broader niches
made available by access to the West was enough to tip the balance. For
Japan, the salient point has been economic stagnation and falling
population.
As for Europe and the U.S., while there have been resource wars (Iraq,
Afghanistan), and economic warfare (Venezuela, Iran), I would say the
main points have been the stagnation of living standards, the
dismantling of the state (austerity), extreme inequality, and especially
the impact of mass immigration--from Latin America to the United
States, and from the Middle East and North Africa to Europe. These have
reached such levels as to become politically hot-button topics for
power-hungry demagogues. As I mentioned before, mass migration is
predictable from the ecological hypothesis. Colinvaux also misses the
complete collapse of the Middle East, which has combined repressive
regimes, a youth bulge, mass unemployment, radical ideology, acute
resource shortages such as fresh water, and rising food prices together
in a witches brew of state failure and social collapse.
As for energy and resources, Colinvaux points out that the lifestyles of
the affluent West are entirely dependent upon cheap and abundant
sources of energy. Again, this is presented as sort of an afterthought,
which is too bad, because this is the major reason why arguments like
Colinvaux's are dismissed out of hand. This is why I wish he would have
dealt with this topic sooner and at more length than in the book's
concluding chapter:
The well-being of the European West was built on cheap energy.
All previous civilizations used energy that was expensive, human labor
supplemented with a little work from animals. Energy is the power to do
work. It is necessary to most of the dimensions of a broad, civilized
niche.
It was failure to find a source of cheap energy that led to economic
stagnation in the later days of the Roman Empire. Romans relied on
slaves to make things, carry things, and to do for people of cultivated
ways those services that make cultivated living possible. This made
certain that very many of the people, the slave classes, would always be
poor, but an even more serious consequence was that the very high cost
of energy meant that businesses could not get ahead; they could not
easily make large surpluses; they failed to generate capital. And a poor
business income meant a low tax base, a government short of funds,
stagnation in the armies, and eventual collapse. Any civilization poor in energy cannot meet the costs of elaborate government and supply needed by crowding numbers.
Even before the industrial revolution, the European West began with a
technology base which was better than that of any previous civilization.
Then it found the Americas to take its surplus people and let the
numbers grow without impossible strains on the costs of government. And
then, after two centuries of growth and conquest without a fossil-fuel
economy, it found how to use coal and oil to do the work that had been
done in other civilizations by slaves. The coal and oil lay on the
ground, loot to be had for the cost of picking it up. It was this loot
of fossil energy that let the West come within measurable distance of
abolishing poverty, despite their rapidly rising numbers. They could
generate capital, give opportunities for trade to more people. carry
people in and out of cities to use resources of space in turn, build
them houses, free them from brute labor and give them time to experiment
with their powers to learn. A very large portion of the people have
become wealthy in the sense that they have had the pressures of rapidly
risings numbers tending to maintain a subculture of poverty in even
the wealthiest cities, but energy has been so cheap that new ways of
living could be invented, for a time, as fast as people were bred to
fill the new niche-spaces. Yet it all has depended on a very large flux of very cheap energy. (pp. 332-333)
As I mentioned earlier, sophisticated technology, applied science, and
extravagant energy use have been the major economic factors for the past
one-hundred and fifty years. These have led to increased living
standards alongside population growth, although it can be argued that
the former caused the latter and not the other way around.
This have caused most people to argue that rising populations are no
longer a problem, nor will they ever be again, and that we have left the
Malthusian world behind once and for all. We will always have science
at our disposal to increase our productivity in perpetuity to stay ahead
of population growth. There is no limit to what the earth can provide,
and the pressure of rising numbers will always bring forth sufficient
"innovation" to solve any problem as it arises. This is taken as an
article of almost religious faith by the West.
Again, Colinvaux would regard such people as delusional at best,
mendacious at worst. How does the above idea square with the fact that
we are already being told we are going to have to eat less meat to save
the planet (eerily echoing the loss of meat consumption faced by our
earliest agricultural ancestors).
Insects are now being touted as the only way to provide sufficient protein for growing numbers. Wild-caught fish are becoming a delicacy due to
declining fish catches, with farm-raised fish lower in vital nutrient as the affordable alternative. Even people in rich Western societies are
being treated to horsemeat, and beef is replaced by "pink slime" and "meat glue."
Is this the innovation that the boosters are touting as "progress?"
We see the effect of crowding everywhere we turn. The younger generation has embraced
the "tiny house" movement,
and even the smallest apartments are unaffordable in big cities such
as New York, London and San Francisco, where prices are out of control.
The quality of even large houses is terrible, comprised of the same
glued-together particle board that makes up our shoddy furniture. Metal
has been replaced by plastic, disposable goods quickly fall apart, and
our thin fabrics wear holes in them after a few months of wear. Energy
efficiency is a good thing, but lets not pretend it is some great
product of "innovation" rather than a way to maintain our exorbitant
lifestyles in the face of rising numbers and declining resources.
Increased competition due to a lack of niches is causing longer work
hours along with a burgeoning prison/guard labor industry to deal with
the fallout. The elderly are compelled to work and the youth are being
denied entry in the job market. Expensive university education is not a
bug, but a feature designed to ensure only children of the affluent will
inherit the more desirable niches. Social mobility is long gone, and a
caste system has descended.
Nepotism is rampant. A
repressive police state beyond imagining has been constructed in nearly every Western society in the span of a decade. Even
life expectancy is decreasing for some demographics for the first time in over a century.
All caused by the weight rising numbers.
How can we really continue to argue that we have left the Malthusian world behind forever? We only took a break thanks to one-time breakthroughs that cannot be repeated, as
Robert Gordon has recently pointed out (but does not go far enough).
It's not just cheap energy, but also cheap food, that has allowed for
the vast population growth we've seen over the past two hundred years.
The two are related, of course. Here it is worth quoting Colinvaux at
length:
The rise of the west also dependent on cheap food. At first the
cheapness came from the new agriculture of novel crops and crop
rotations, the farming from which the cities of Renaissance Europe and
Tudor England were fed. Then came the vast glut of cheap food from
America, that glut which forced the English government to repeal the
corn laws and destroy its own farming industry. The English countryside
became depopulated despite the massive growth of the British population.
Even in America itself a similar thing happened as large areas of New
England, once farmed, were given back to the wilderness in the face of
competition from prairie wheat and corn. A historian of the future
looking at the record of either old or new England from this period
could make the same error of historians of the later Roman Empire who
imagine that the population was falling.
The next cause of cheapness in food came from applying the new cheap
energy to agriculture. Tractors, harvesting and planting machines and,
above all, chemical fertilizers lowered the costs of growing food even
as they increased the total supply. The cheapness of food from this
episode, now ending, was entirely dependent on the cheapness of the very
large fluxes of energy used.
There then came yet one further push to cheap food. This was the
development of crops such as hybrid corn, a new agriculture that goes by
the name of the "green revolution" in the contemporary press. This agriculture is completely and inextricably dependent on a large flux of cheap energy.
The ecological engineering that went into making the new varieties is
elegant, but the plants are made to rely on our supplies of cheap energy
in order to grow at all. An understanding of this dependence of crops
on fuel energy is vital to understanding our future.
The total energy that all our crops can trap from the sun is set in ways
that we have not been able to alter. Most likely the actual limit is
set by access of the plant to carbon in the air, for it cannot make
sugar faster than it can get carbon. All crops and wild plants accept
this limit alike, and we have not been able to increase this primary
production of plants by one iota. What farmers have done is to breed
varieties of plant that put down more of their store of sugar into parts
that people like to eat. We measure the productivity of a wheat
crop by the weight of grain, not the weight of roots, stems and leaves.
Cultivated wheat puts much of its energy reserve of sugar into grain
whereas its wild ancestor used most of the reserve to maintain healthy
roots and stems in the rough and tumble of wild life, but both kinds of
wheat had the same sugar to start with.
With the new varieties of the green revolution we have pushed this process one step further. We
have taken over many of the functions that a wild plant had to do for
itself, and have done it for the plant ourselves, in factories. We
do not let the plant hunt out scarce minerals with its roots, we give it
superabundant supplies of fertilizer so that it does not have to work
for its nutrients. We take away a plant's ability to protect itself
against disease and pests, because the plant used to spend part of the
energy reserves of its grain to do the job itself. Instead we protect
the plant with chemicals. In other words we keep alive, with fertilizer
and chemicals, a plant that would have had no chance of hacking it
alone, and the energy that its ancestor would have spent in fighting its
own battles is then freed for the plant to make more grain, this extra
grain, therefore, is entirely dependent on the cheap fuels supplied to
our chemical industries; indeed, in a real sense the energy of this
extra grain is some of the energy from the chemical industry. We are
actually eating fossil fuel. And this fuel is soon going to be expensive
almost beyond our present understanding. (pp. 333-335)
As for the future of cheap energy:
Western society has been built on the treasure hoard of fossil fuel lying loose at the surface of the earth. It is as if we have been living on the loot of some vast and undetected robbery. But the loot is far gone.
The oil may be half used, or more. There is still coal, but the best,
or at least the most easily reached, is gone. We have bred very large
populations to use this cheap fuel so that our use is now at a rate
which means that the remainder must be spent far more quickly than what
we have used already. And now the rest of the world wants to use fuel as
we have done. We must share the swag--what there is left of it.
This means that energy will soon be expensive whereas once it was cheap. It is not that we will run out of energy; it is rather that we will run out of cheap energy.
Indeed, we already have, though present (1980) prices are still
absurdly low by the standards of what will be the norms ten years from
now. Oil, and then coal, will soon be so expensive that nuclear reactors
will seem economical to run. We can then pursue research into whatever
esoteric methods of energy production we like. There will always be
energy, but at a very high price. Never again win energy be cheap,
plentiful and easy to extract. This is a fact with profound implications
for the politics of nations.
Cheap food too has gone forever. The good parts of the earth are
all farmed, and the yield does not quite keep up with the demands of the
increasing numbers of people, the crops of the green revolution will be
extremely expensive to produce as energy prices rise, probably, in
fact, too expensive for poorer countries to use them at all. To the
extent that these new crops are abandoned, food production will actually
fall, requiring that prices go up in response to the increasing
imbalance of demand and supply. Demand too will grow as our numbers
continue to grow. In the productive agriculture of the West, farmers
will have to start economizing in the use of tractors and fertilizer, as
their energy costs climb. They will find themselves using more labor,
both human and animal. Their yields need not fall, but the price must go
up.
We are, therefore, moving into a time when both energy and food will
be dear. Many patterns of civilized life are about to change as a
result. The spreads of cities will be different, the countryside
will be repopulated, there will be quite different patterns of work and
play. It may not be something to fear; it may be rather an opportunity,
like all change, for the most adventurous to welcome. Perhaps we can
dismantle city governments, break monopolies of power, live country
lives when we want to, and work in small industries for brave
entrepreneurs instead of serving some giant corporation. Change is
always good for the brighter spirits, and the high cost of fuel and food
make drastic change inevitable. But the new patterns must certainly
offer new temptations and straits which might drive nations to battle,
even nuclear battle.(pp. 336-337)
Pretty impressive considering it was published about twenty years earlier than books such as
The Party's Over,
Hubbert's Peak, and
The Long Emergency.
And we've earlier seen how rising numbers inevitably bring about more
bureaucracy, more laws, more regulations, and less freedom. This is not
some "conspiracy" of elites as certain more paranoid quarters like to
argue, nor is it a nefarious scheme of socialist bureaucrats simply to
feather their own nests as libertarians argue. Rather, it is a logical
and inevitable consequence of rising numbers:
There must now be fear that the press of restriction will increase,
possibly rapidly, because we are about to lose our large flux of cheap
energy and cheap food. Almost inescapably, lack of cheap energy will
mean lack of cheap capital, which will lead to a progressive shortage
of new opportunities for living well. Since the numbers of people must
be expected to continue slowly to rise, then the progressive loss of
freedom that we already experience must accelerate. (p. 348)
In Europe the mass of the people have long been denied the use of
wilderness or countryside by patterns of "ownership" that make "no
trespassing" a common sign of law. Americans are still happily ignorant
of laws against tresspass, yet they find fewer and fewer places where
they can go without checking with some official first, Americans must
reserve time to climb a mountain, file travel plans if they walk in the
climb a mountain, file travel plans if they walk in the Sierras, get
permission before they wander in an Alaskan wild place. We can no longer
do as we please because so many people want the land that they cannot
all use it at the same time. So the land is rationed—though various
euphemisms are used for the offensive socialist word "ration." (p.347)
City, suburban and business fife is set about with regulations—irritating, pettifogging, bureaucratic restrictions. We
blame governments for being too big and remote but, whether the mood of
the electorate swings to the left or the right, nothing much seems to
change. Yet it is not some error of government that causes this
restriction, it is the gentle jostlings of the people. It IS a result of
people-pressure. The irksome mounting of petty restrictions, which
president and prime minister alike have not been able to stop, is the
fruit of expansion when the numbers of people are only a little fewer
than the number of opportunities there are to let them live in a
reasonable way. The people must be rationed to niche-spaces, and
bureaucratic restrictions are the ration cards.(p. 348)
The older societies always developed very oppressive social systems when
the rising numbers could be accommodated in no other way; the mass was
compressed so that the few might live well. Likewise we find ourselves
beset by the big government which is part of this process...If we do not
find ourselves ranked more steeply by social caste, it is because we
have earlier gone so far in removing poor, narrow and low-caste lives
from our society entirely...each society will find other ways of keeping
people in their places. Probably this means state socialism with its
idea of equal shares of what little there is, backed up by the sanction
of law. Our choice, therefore, will be rationing by caste and wealth to
yield unequal shares in great variety or rationing by the apparatus of a
socialist state with it inevitable uniformity.
Liberty, in the Jeffersonian sense, cannot survive a continual packing-in of people.
If our numbers continue to rise on a resource base that expands but
little, the future inevitably holds ever greater restrictions on
individual freedom. Our descendants will not be able to live as we live
and our free American and European ways of doing things will seem like
poems of the past. Liberty will fall progressively as the numbers rise,
and obedient compliance with the majority Will must take the place of
individual initiative. Perhaps some politician cleverer than the rest
will arrange this necessary peaceful compliance and call it "free." (p.
349)
Such were Colinvaux's conclusions back in 1980 based on his ecological
hypothesis, and I think it's safe to say, with a few reservations noted
above, that it has held up pretty well and been pretty accurate in
predicting our present course in the years since it was first published.
Even events which he missed could be reasonably derived from it as
noted above.
Since much of these entries could be contrued as rather disconcerting
and disheartening, I will end on a positive note with this sentiment
from the author:
This is a good time to be living, for ours are the generations with
accumulated knowledge and who yet see the end of the easy times with
their swag of free energy. Change, the friend of the clever and the
innovative, is close upon us. There are going to be some good and
interesting things to do. (p. 351)
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