Drowning in Sight of the Shore: Caught in Eddies of Progress

By Angel Goya

Using the metaphor of the second law of thermodynamics, which states that the amount of entropy of a thermodynamically isolated system tends to increase with time until no more entropy is possible, this book examines the challenges of the twenty-first centuryand offers solutions.

Angel Goya, a lawyer and civil servant, reveals the connections between the major civilizations of antiquity and the fourteenth century, including their successful or failed attempts to survive climatic, cultural, political, and economic challenges.

More importantly, he applies lessons from the past to contemporary society, arguing that to avoid entropy, a technological leap is always required to meet challenges.

Specific chapters explore how climate change, natural disasters, and the environment shaped the Roman empire; how the Roman army was a reflection of the empires development; and how culture, religion, and the migration of peoples influenced civilizations in cultural, sociopolitical, and economic terms across the world up to modern times.

Get solutions to problems by looking to the past, and find out why we must embrace globalization instead of reverting to protectionism in Drowning at the Sight of the Shore.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: Apr 16, 2018
• ISBN: 9781480852297

Angel Goya

Angel Goya, a lawyer and civil servant, was born in Spain in 1964. He has predominantly worked as a manager in Spanish public research bodies, including the National Research Council, Center for Energy, Environmental and Technological Research, and the Geological and Mining Institute of Spain. He also served as civil governor in the province of Guipzcoa, in the Basque Country, during the height of the Euskadi Ta Askatasunas separatist movement. He is currently a labor counselor at the Spanish Embassy in Berlin.

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Copyright © 2016 ANGEL GOYA.

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This book is a work of non-fiction. Unless otherwise noted, the author and the publisher make no explicit guarantees as to the accuracy of the information contained in this book and in some cases, names of people and places have been altered to protect their privacy.

ISBN: 978-1-4808-5230-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4808-5231-0 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4808-5229-7 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017915490

Archway Publishing rev. date: 3/29/2018

CONTENTS

PART 1. PAST CHALLENGES AND OUTCOMES:

THERMODYNAMIC LAWS APPLIED TO HISTORY

Determinism and randomness in the evolution and collapse of societies

The role of thermodynamics in historical transformation

1. Rome

Increasing complexity: from Republic to Empire

The influence of paleoclimatology on history

The Roman army as a reflection of the rise and fall of Greco-

Roman civilization

Love of wisdom, barbarism and religion in the classical world

Conclusions: the different views of the Fall of Rome

2. Different Solutions to the 14th-Century Crisis

China (220-1644)

The Islamic World

Europe

PART 2. THE CHALLENGES OF THE 21ST CENTURY

1. Technology and Science

2. Environment

3. Economy

4. The Challenges of Conflict: War and Guerilla Warfare in

the 21St Century

5. Culture And Religion in the 21st Century

6. Thermodynamics in the 21st Century: The Resilience and

Viability of Western Globalization

APPENDICES

Appendix I – List of Battles and Conflicts Referenced

Appendix 2 – A Concise List of Thinkers and Thought

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Angel Goya was born in Spain in 1964. He is a lawyer and civil servant. He has predominantly worked as a manager in Spanish public research bodies: National Research Council (CSIC), Center for Energy, Environmental and Technological Research (CIEMAT), and the Geological and Mining Institute of Spain (IGME). His professional work has given him international insight into different aspects of the European and American reality in his capacity as Attaché for Education in New York, Director of the UNED Center in Miami, and Institutional Consultant at the European Fusion for Energy Agency. He also served as Civil Governor in the province of Guipúzcoa, in the Basque Country, during the height of ETA’s activities and he participated in the normalization of the struggle against anti-terrorism within the channels of the rule of law. He is currently Labor Counselor at the Spanish Embassy in Berlin.

PART 1.

PAST CHALLENGES AND

OUTCOMES: THERMODYNAMIC

LAWS APPLIED TO HISTORY

INTRODUCTION

1. DETERMINISM AND RANDOMNESS IN THE EVOLUTION AND COLLAPSE OF SOCIETIES

Whenever we analyze the past, we inevitably tend to draw conclusions about the future. A long line of authoritative figures since the time of Thucydides have occupied themselves with historical foresight, the science dedicated to forecasting the future based on today’s data. Most philosophers in history, from Plato to Toynbee, by way of Plutarch, Machiavelli, Gibbon, Burke, Marx and Popper, were frustrated politicians who attempted to justify in the laboratory of political theory the validity of their unsuccessful experiences in political praxis. Philosophizing about history, like making war, is simply the continuation of politics by other means.

This is precisely why it is impossible for objective truth to exist in the field of historical analysis. Neutral philosophy, in the Marxian sense, does not exist independently of ideology. Personal, cultural and environmental circumstances always characterize, but do not necessarily determine, the conclusions. As these circumstances are constantly changing, it is no more possible for there to be an end of the philosophy of history, than for there to be an end of history.

However, regardless of the ideological and cultural perspective of the interlocutor, we need to establish a solid foothold as a starting point for any study of human history. The position should be one from which we can build an interpretation through pure syllogistic or metaphorical deduction. It should be a lowest common denominator that avoids the application of any pejorative connotation that the term ideology might contain in Marxian language. It needs to be something that acts as the rational foundation, a cogito ergo sum of undeniable truth applicable to any geographical, cultural or temporal context.

There is only one such possible basis. It can apply as much to experimental sciences as to social sciences, and is as valid in the context of Newtonian as in quantum or relativistic mechanics. It is the Laws of Thermodynamics, and especially the Second Law: The amount of entropy in an isolated system tends to increase with time until it reaches its maximum value.

Sic transit gloria mondi. The nature of life in all its manifestations is transitory; the same is true for civilizations. Great empires always eventually succumb to the organismistic metaphor: they are born, they grow, they may (or may not) reproduce with one or more offspring and then they die. Entropy, the gradual increase in organizational disorder that, from a high point, eventually leads to a society’s decline, is the only inescapable truth. It is the only truth which can be categorically appreciated in the history of human existence through simple empirical observation.

We can argue about whether this transformation is dialectic or not. If we establish a sufficiently long measurement unit for the concept of time, we can debate as to whether spiraling growth, with momentary setbacks, is possible. However, the long-term tendency always points to the notion of indefinite progress. However, no matter how people understand history, there is an obvious consequence: decline is always the necessary consequence of any moment of glory.

This is the only inescapable truth and it has a no less inescapable consequence: there will be highs and lows, but an end of history is not possible. Dinosaurs dominated the world and annihilated the previous victors of the Cambrian explosion. We mammals did the same with dinosaurs, with or without the help of meteorites from outer space. Every Romulus, every Caesar, is succeeded by a Romulus Augustulus. And an Odoacer ultimately always appears. In other words, there is a beginning, middle, and end in any process. This is the only historical truth. Reality always eventually makes a mockery of the idealizations of the Hegelian Prussian State¹, the universal communist societies of the Engelsian Diamat, or the capitalisms of American imperialism that triumphed in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall as described by Francis Fukuyama². This is the only unquestionable reality and it is the only way to be able to redefine the world of knowledge in social sciences. It is the only way we can theorize about a true philosophy of history.

This book attempts to go beyond organismistic metaphors. It will therefore focus on a few examples from classical history that serve to predict the course of current Western civilization. It is based on cultural relativisms that prevent us from mourning over moments past from the vantage point of a West in decline, of an Untergang des Abendlandes³. It is impossible to identify a classical period when we might want to halt the course of the life development cycle of a civilization. Evolution is a constant, never-ending process in permanent flux.

Evolution does not always take the form of a positive gradient. Scientific-technical progress is a clear example that history is never linear, and nor is artistic progress.

If, instead of the Parthenon, we compare Agrippa’s Pantheon with Austrasian religious or Asturian pre-Romanesque architecture, we would have to be seriously committed to the concept of cultural relativism to rank the Pantheon at the same level as the Church of San Miguel de Lillo. The whiff of decline and the eagerness to write about it always surfaces in Gibbon and his kind⁴, who see the vestiges of a fallen civilization. It is impossible to rid oneself of this aftertaste after contemplating the ruins of places like Pompeii and Herculaneum that different civilizations have left in their wake. In a few centuries observers will even accuse our civilization of being a second-rate imitator of art in long-term decline. Someone will then write about Henry Moore’s works and comment on the decline that sculpture has suffered since Michelangelo’s David. This might also happen, if the observer does not have a much broader perspective and does not believe that the decline in sculpture set in immediately after Praxiteles completed his work or after Laocoön and His Sons was sculpted in Roman Pergamum.

There is only one way to prevent subjective evaluations of ideology and culture from muddying and contaminating an analysis of the past: we need to be pragmatic enough not to look for the same paradigm of objective, immutable laws that, for centuries, experts in experimental sciences believed possible; we need to settle for accepting the Cartesian principle characterizing our western culture and look for an unquestionable element. And once we identify it, we kill Descartes and dispense with the deductive rational method, and return to the early rationalism of the Presocratics. We need to understand social sciences, not as n exact science but as a simple approach based on metaphors of reality and to see that there is at the very least as much truth in the poetry of Hesiod as in the science of Aristotle.

If we clearly and distinctly analyze all the information we have on different civilizations, and examine their autumns and winters, we have no option other than to abandon the search for a deductive, rational approach to reality based on the existence of unyielding laws like the laws of physics. Fortunately, there are no inexorable historical laws: not even thermodynamics can be rigorously applied to social sciences. This is only something possible from an approximative point of view. We need to limit ourselves to establishing trends. The data given by social sciences is not always objective, but if we use the deductive, rational mechanisms of our western cultural ethos we are forced to establish abstract general laws. In the end, this is simply a contaminated consequence of a specific cultural and ideological background, our western background.

However, we need to avoid this contamination. We need to gather supposedly unquestionable primary data from the historical past and use it to find metaphors, similes and like-sounding concepts among the different civilizations being studied. Nevertheless, we should always be aware that we are talking about metaphors of dissimilar data, not identities. This is why we should never look for general laws, either in comparative terms between civilizations, or internally in a particular civilization’s evolutionary course. We need to consider that any general law is true only for the purposes of a statistical regularity, which works like Newtonian mechanics: it is valid for specific spatio-temporal scenarios, which typically occur in everyday life, but which will produce distortions if we attempt to take them further and apply them to exceptional scenarios such as the Big Bang or the inside of a black hole. The fact is that the history of all peoples, as with all individuals, is full of youthful outbursts or senile collapses that never obey a general law, to use the organismistic metaphor again.

We therefore aim to use supposedly unquestionable historical data to confirm the existence of common traits in moments of a civilization’s glory and, more importantly, its decline and collapse. However, we reject the notion that the Summers of the Antonines are superior to the moments of the Triumph of Barbarism and Religion.

Once we have identified these common traits, we compare them, and establish comparative metaphors, but in the knowledge that metaphors are what they are; that the image of birth, growth, reproduction and death is no more than a simple metaphor; that applying thermodynamics to history is also a metaphor and therefore so is the concept of entropy applied to social sciences. Alongside the metaphors, we can often see many similarities, but they do not contain the attributes that symbolically distinguish the metaphor from the object it is compared with. A simile is a different figure of speech from a metaphor, but it often helps to illustrate a statement. Similarly, it helps to use a host of correlative data in different civilizations that sound the same, but the reality of which is quite different.

We must always tread carefully and attempt to focus our foresight on trends, and never specific facts. Tensions between an empire and its external periphery will always exist and intensify as the level of entropy in the imperial system increases. But we can never infer from this that a Mexican Alaric will sack Washington or New York in the 22nd or 23rd century. It may or may not happen.

What we can assert is that tension arising from the influx of Mexican nationals into the US territories occupied in the wake of the Guadalupe Hidalgo Treaty in 1849 will be a constant in North American politics for the next two centuries. The tragicomedy of history rarely appears twice in the same way. Traits may be shared, but the identities are different

We must always steer clear of the temptation to base any analysis on the search for unyielding physical laws. Because these laws are based on the deductive rational abstraction of empirical facts, they may allow us to prophesize the future recurrence of these facts. As Jared Diamond paraphrases⁵ the beginning of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina: All happy civilizations in their heyday are always equal, each unhappy civilization, in its decline, is unhappy in its own way…

We therefore need to focus on a few points that are common to different examples of the fall of extremely complex societies and study them, but with a special focus on the shared aspects of their evolution. We therefore propose an approximative study of each specific society as a whole, but pay special attention to a diachronic study of the features shared between the different "declines which may at times sound extremely modern.

As a first approximation, we could cite a no means comprehensive series of points shared by all societies:

• an initial reduction in wealth, in many instances based on climatic causes or the depletion of the sustaining foundation of agricultural wealth. At some point this extends to all the segments of society, in addition to farming.

• the agrarian (and/or commercial) middle class fails to adapt to change, which leads to greater polarization of both society as a whole, and within each of the different social classes.

• political or military crisis eventually leads to greater militarization of society in the face of the mounting strength of the central power’s different internal and external enemies. Militarization in turn entails higher spending by the state, meaning that society cannot create enough wealth to absorb the growing public deficit. And, as a short-term solution to the deficit, governments resort to increasingly higher taxation, public debt financed at higher rates of interest, an ever sharper devaluation of the currency standard, all of which in turn lead to steeper inflation.

• deficit-overtaxation-inflation eventually ruins the already hard hit rural middle class, and land ownership therefore becomes increasingly polarized. Elements of society monopolize the creation of wealth and political power. This in turn reinforces the centrifugal tendencies driving the peripheral plutocracies away from the central empire.

• the peripheries gain strength, the central power’s might and resilience are undermined and trigger excessive militarism within the empire (civil wars). This internal weakness is always linked with growing external military weakness against barbarian attacks despite the growing differences in the quality of life on both sides of the artificially created borders. Differences in the quality of life will make frontiers more permeable to individuals which not only increases the appeal of migration for barbarians, it also has the effect of making the empire’s conquest by barbarian political structures desirable. Most importantly, the weakness of the imperial structure makes these barbarian kingdoms to believe it is possible to conquer it. This then increases the requirements for the empire’s defensive military structure and feeds back into the spiral of deficit-overtaxation-inflation.

• social polarization means that the basic needs of the steadily impoverished masses are met locally through self-sufficiency. Commerce loses its importance and becomes restricted exclusively to meeting the élite’s needs for luxury articles, but only when legal security and secure lines of communication allow. This dynamic eventually brings about the ruin of the commercial bourgeoisie. The urban population shrinks. Local institutions achieve greater self-sufficiency and independence from the central power. Society requires increasingly less specialization of labor, which reduces the complexity of economic life since less territorial specialization in production will be needed.

• society’s ruralization gradually leads to the spread and eventual simplification of the dominant class’s arts and philosophy. New religions, like heresies, emerge, struggling for supremacy and permeating the entire social fabric in an attempt to achieve control that is in many cases totalitarian. This also leads to a gradual simplification and trivialization of cultural and artistic life.

• economic crisis and militarization in everyday life exacerbate the idea of an empire ranged against ethnic and cultural others, the idea of the threat of outsiders from beyond the borders, but also at home. Paradoxically however, the ruling classes abandon the army to seek refuge in local political control. Mid-level military ranks are no longer filled by the middle classes, but by foreign mercenaries, who belong to the others. A middle class striving to defend the Empire ceases to exist. All there will be is an oligarchy which the outside world sees as increasingly weak.

These are a few of the broad lines of a common evolution. While lacking the deterministic nature of physical laws, they provide us with an overview of the lowest common denominator of the different empires in decline. It is a lowest common denominator which often goes further than expected. For example, all too often, even these internal contradictions end up causing a first external assault, which, after a long struggle, is rebuffed by the more complex society. This first attempt is followed by Toynbee’s Indian Summer, which out of necessity is distinct from the might and vigor of Gibbon’s Summer of the Antonines⁶. It means a second assault cannot be repulsed. The Empire falls and the Second Law of Thermodynamics eventually triumphs.

These broad strokes are common to the late Roman Empire, the Gupta Empire in India, the different Islamic empires, the continuity of China that can be traced, despite Kublai Khan, to the Song and Ming dynasties, and finally the Spanish Empire itself, in its Castilian and Portuguese versions, from the second half of the 16th century. They also apply to the French and British empires of the last few centuries (with features more in keeping with the Modern Age).

The metaphors and similes we apply will shed light on these empires’ past, as well as serve as indicators to forecast future evolution, especially if their consequences are extrapolated to the more recent past and to the present. The comparison will help to confirm the existence of these common indicators in all the instances the decline of Anglo-Saxon empires, the two aspects of which, the British and then the North American, have dominated the world stage since the development of industrial capitalism in the mid-18th century. If our approach is valid, we can imagine the increasing entropy in our own civilization, the contradictions of globalization and the existence of ever greater centrifugal tendencies. It will confirm the United States’ (and even NATO’s,) current inability to sustain several conflicts at once, with the ensuing repercussions on public deficit, monetary exuberance, the need for higher taxation, the risk of deflation or stagflation, society’s polarization (between an increasingly richer top decile and steady impoverishment of the middle class) and economic isolationism. This is all in the context of the 21st century which is marked by the environmental crisis and the need for a technological leap for the sake of sustainability, especially in energy.

Finally, we briefly reflect on the development evolution of certain fields of study over these historical periods: the evolution of philosophy and religion; of logos and techne, science and technology, as often opposing faces of a single Janus; ruralization and urbanization; the dependence of (public and private) law on the economic infrastructure; syncretic cultural globalization and magical-religious cultural tribalization, and its dependence on climate, its evolution and physical space.

In short, we attempt to show, rather than demonstrate, that humans, as a species, are insignificant; that we have to learn to use our freedom; but in the knowledge that it is limited by thermodynamics, by the succession of equivalent metaphors, and by the very principle of causality brought about by our actions. These actions have specific consequences for the planet and humanity itself, because —this is in fact a consequence of physical law— humanity has to be aware that natural resources are limited when it attempts to expand beyond its means. Overexploitation always forces Mother Earth, Lovestock’s living Gaia, to defend herself. Our species can sculpt The Winged Victory of Samothrace or build copies of Auschwitz. But it is limited. In the end, our reptilian hypothalamus has to accept this.

Increasing entropy in a human society is inevitable. Man’s ability to transform is limited. We are merely miniscule carbon-based chains floating in the immensity of the cosmos. Consider, for instance, a minor change in solar activity that could result in climatic, economic and social consequences far greater than the aftermath of Attila’s defeat in the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains. We need to learn how to react to the different challenges that excessive growth has caused in two centuries and the increasing scarcity of these limited, energy and non-energy resources. We need to be aware of the insignificance of our carbon-based chains.

2. THE ROLE OF THERMODYNAMICS IN HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATION

Evolution in the complexity of political organizations is one of the few areas in which the metaphor of unyielding physical laws can be seen to interact with social sciences in a relatively coherent way. This is precisely why the energy necessary to maintain complexity is directly proportional to the greater complexity of socio-political organization, greater specialization of labor, greater cultural sophistication, and, in short, the greater number of components within a society. Since a complex organization always requires a specific amount of energy to develop, it may be feasible to begin to apply the laws of thermodynamics, even only as a simile or metaphor. There is one simple reason for this: when we speak of the energy required for a socio-political organization to function, we are speaking of a quantitative magnitude: the energy required, which is something that can be measured in metric magnitudes. Ideally we could roughly calculate the annual horsepower per capita required by a society to operate. It can be measured even if we do not know how. This energy requires positive returns to feed back into the system.

We can therefore infer that a favorable ratio is needed between the energy investment made and the benefits obtained by society from the investment. In the long term, we could also say that the marginal ratio will need to be favorable for each increase in the energy investment, by feeding back the benefits obtained. Each increase in complexity and in energy invested by society needs to be capitalized on. Indeed, for a society to be able to climb to higher levels of complexity in a sustained way, each increase in investment needs to imply, as neoclassical economists would say, that the marginal yield on invested energy is positive. This is why the thermodynamic metaphor may be useful in studying the evolution of societies: because, when all is said and done, evolution is simply the evolution of a particular energy system.

Even though it only used as a metaphor, the direct and marginal profitability needs to be favorable for the system to be stable and resilient. This last concept also derives from physical laws —this time from the calculation of materials— and it has spread extensively in recent decades in the social sciences. This is because a structure’s resilience, that is, its ability to withstand different external changes, is one of the key indicators of its health and is essentially related to the concept of thermodynamic equilibrium. A high-entropy society will always be less resilient than one in thermodynamic equilibrium: it will seek balance through a leap to greater profitable complexity or it will finally tend toward less complexity. This phenomenon could be expressed as a society’s sophistication in reaching thermodynamic equilibrium, or what is traditionally called decline or collapse.

The pursuit of thermodynamic equilibrium is a reality in all societies, both those, like primitive ones, which, according to Tainter⁷, require an expenditure of 0.05 Hp/capita per year; and complex modern nation-state societies below the poverty threshold (such as modern Eritrea which requires 0.38 Hp/capita per year). This is also true of contemporary First World societies like North America (which requires 15.14 Hp/capita per year)⁸. Just as a bike needs to be pedaled to keep moving forward, human societies need energy to operate. However, for sustainable operation (another key, but over-used term), a balance is needed between the resources invested in energy and the profitability that society obtains from this investment. All societies need to find this quasi-thermodynamic equilibrium which, at the same time, allows resources to feed back into the system.

However, energy profitability changes over time. All societies, both the ultra-complex and the most primitive, always evolve, over years or millennia. All of them need the energy profitability of society’s suprastructural investment to be maintained and this will be directly proportional to the greater (or lesser) marginal increase in the favorable ratio of energy investment. Depending on the level of the marginal increase (or decrease), the system’s entropy will decrease or increase. If entropy increases, the only possible solution is either to take a step change to profitable and greater complexity (normally via a technological leap that leads to a more sophisticated society) or decline, stagnation and collapse. Homeostatic balance may be lost for short periods of time. However, in the end, a thermodynamically imbalanced society will always die or mutate into another less complex one where lower energy investment is capitalized on in a stable way but which is in balance in this political, economic, social and cultural mix.

The evolution of the complexity in organizations between the Neolithic era and the 20th century has been one of geometric progression. To follow Tainter again, a formerly primitive human society that has developed beyond the Neolithic, like the North American Indians immediately before the arrival of the Europeans, might have some 3,000 tools. The US army disembarking in Casablanca in 1942 had 500,000. As we saw above, in parallel, the energy expenditure necessary increased in a similar way: from 0.05 Hp/person per year in a modern primitive society to over 15 Hp/person per year in today’s United States. Although the level of calories their bodies needs is the same, North Americans require 300 times more energy than the natives of the Amazon to survive. And this inverted energy must be capitalized on. This has only ever been achieved through constant, accelerated, technological change over these 10,000 years that separate us from the Neolithic revolution. It is without parallel in the preceding five million years since we diverged from the other large primates. Only the technological revolution that began with crop and livestock farming has man been able to achieve a positive ratio between society’s ever greater investment in complexity and the return on this investment. This is despite the Law of Diminishing Marginal Productivity, which has such a high level of irreversibility that it is hard to believe it is not a physical law, but a simple metaphor.

It is almost an unyielding law that the returns on society’s investment are significant in the first stages of economic (and sociopolitical) development, as described by Rostow, and that the marginal returns begin to decline over time. We can compare the respective economic miracles of Eisenhower’s USA, Germany, Italy or Spain half a century later. It is unviable for China to maintain its current rates of growth in fifty years’ time. Even assuming that the planet could provide the raw materials necessary to maintain current rates (which will be impossible), growth will inevitably slow down. Only one real way exists to maintain high levels of growth for a protracted period (even lower than at the moment of take-off): investment in R&D. A time always comes when the different comparative advantages of an emerging country diminish. Research and innovation eventually become the only weapons in the struggle against the law of diminishing marginal returns. However, something significant needs to be said. The change in western lifestyle that occurred between 1870 and 1914 (electricity, telephone, cars, aviation, and radio) came about with annual R&D spending of below 1%. In 1960, on the eve of the space race and the computing revolution, the USA dedicated 2.6% of GDP to R&D. In 2013 it dedicated 2.8%. The technological return diminishes while investment increases. In the meantime, we continue to drive the same combustion-engine cars, fly the same subsonic planes and flick a switch for electricity, over 90% of which comes from the same energy sources as in 1960. That was over fifty years ago.

While the marginal productivity of energy investment in a system always declines, the returns on any additional investment in complexity from a given moment are always decreasing. Again to play on Rostow’s aeronautical metaphor, from a given moment there will always be a point of no return for a complex society. Either a qualitative technological leap occurs or the marginal productivity of the energy investment in the complex society diminishes. Though it is true that the profitability of the marginal productivity declines first, a time comes when society’s productivity will diminish in absolute terms.

This point of no return that determines a society’s future will always exist. A technology leap is then necessary to prevent the increased entropy from leading to the society’s decline or collapse. If the point of no return is not passed at that moment, then a time will come when there will never be another chance to turn the tide. What the Americans call the rate of energy return on energy invested, the ERoEI (a concept we will return to later) will be less than 1. A complex society will collapse because it will find it unprofitable to make the investment needed to maintain this complexity.

This is abundantly clear in an agrarian society where real technological revolution does not exist⁹. Increased productivity always leads to population growth, which makes it necessary to occupy less productive lands. As these lands are tilled, the marginal productivity of the farming system as a whole diminishes. Every new hectare added to the system reduces marginal productivity, because every hectare of it that is ploughed is evidently less fertile than the previous one. The entropy of the system, which is understood to be a closed system, will diminish. At a given moment, the investment in complexity ceases to be work-related and becomes an issue of sociopolitical organization and is thus no longer profitable because the required feedback in the system, that is, the feedback from the energy investment, is less.

In these cases, the only possible solution is to achieve greater complexity in order to reduce the system’s entropy. Lesser complexity will lead to the reduction in an energy gradient, a key factor in modern open system thermodynamics. If the concept is transferred to human organizations, a technological revolution will be needed for the energy profitability of a more complex society. If the second law of thermodynamics is reworked for these organizations, as complex open systems, as Schneider and Sagan describe¹⁰, as opposed to closed systems as first formulated by Carnot in the 19th century, a leap to greater complexity is always necessary. Each complex system reduces the system’s entropy by reducing an energy gradient. We can see a classic example of this in a complex open system such as the biosphere. With greater organizational complexity and a greater number of very different sophisticated ecological niches (for example, the tropical forest), the temperature declines, despite the greater impact on solar radiation. Energy is transformed into more biomass (and into biomass organized into more complex ecological niches) and reduces the energy gradient (what we commonly refer to as a drop in temperature). Otherwise, where do we find the greatest energy levels on Earth that are not channeled into complex biomass, of heat measured in degrees centigrade? The answer is in deserts, where a qualitative leap in the system’s complexity has not happened and where energy has barely been transformed into biomass and daytime solar radiation is immediately converted into higher temperatures.

In a complex system, the tendency to improve energy efficiency is a necessary constant for the system’s survival. There is only one way to sustainably reduce the individual entropy of the subsystems that form it: the creation of more complex organizations that lead to an improvement in energy efficiency. Nevertheless, we should not delude ourselves: 99% of subsystems will die with no successors; evolution is never simple. However, 1% will become a more complex system and thanks to this it will adapt adequately to a hostile challenge.

Open system thermodynamics essentially requires a Darwinian struggle for life in every different open system. This is true whether they are the macro-products of the Big Bang that shape our universe, living beings or human organizations. All systems must adapt by leaping to structures of greater complexity or the only alternative is to perish for failing to adapt to these more complex systems that channel individual entropy. Individuals, or subsystems, will die, but there will always be room for their self-replication in a final ascent to higher levels of complexity. An almost Bergsonian élan vital exists that makes this necessary, and to reach the Teilhardian Omega Point¹¹ of greater complexity, or a Prinzip-Hoffnung as proposed by Ernst Bloch¹².

In fact, the application of thermodynamic principles to social sciences is probably rather more than a metaphor although it cannot be considered as an unyielding physical law. Equations cannot be applied as in other fields of scientific methodology because it is impossible to constantly measure a society’s energy consumption or the energy investment in its suprastructure. But they are measurable. What is more, thermodynamics is the only field, of all the 19th century’s unyielding compulsory physical laws, which continued to function when the Kuhnian paradigm shifted at the turn of the century. When Newtonian mechanics¹³ stopped being generally valid for the whole universe, thermodynamics withstood the test of time. Quantum mechanics works at the immensely small level and respects thermodynamic laws. Relativity works at the immensely large level and also respects these laws. They continue to be valid even in the 21st century. When Hawking and Bekenstein conducted their studies into black holes, as the most extreme condition for experimenting in physics, they even proved that the laws of thermodynamics were maintained. Furthermore, the debate on the existence of a cosmological variable —either positive or negative—that could predict a universe in constant expansion or oscillation respects the laws of thermodynamics in its models.

The second law of thermodynamics is applicable to the universe itself as a complex organization. We still do not know if it is possible for reality to consist of a single universe regardless of whether it is oscillating (and at some time will collapse into a volume corresponding to the Planck constant¹⁴), or expansive (until its death on reaching a maximum level of entropy); or whether, to the contrary, our universe is only one among many possible universes in a plausible multiverse. We still do not know.

However, in the end, the universe’s increasing complexity since the Big Bang is simply a development of the thermodynamic rule whereby entropy is reduced through an increase in the complexity of the universe itself. This could apply even in universes other than our own with other dimensions and other elementary particles unknown in ours. In the end, the élan vital always leads to greater complexity in Everything, although, along the way, supernova stars die, galaxies or even the universe itself collapse, no matter whether we accept oscillations or multiverse visions. The objective is always to achieve this Omega Point. Carnot will always win out over Bergson and Teilhard (and also Hegel and even Marx).

Whatever happens with the universe as a whole happens with biology. Carnot is bound to win out over Darwin. The evolution of living beings is simply another example of this tendency to improve energy efficiency and to decrease individual entropy. This tendency is also reflected in the creation of increasingly complex organizations; in this case, ecosystems, as we saw in the comparison of forest and desert ecosystems. But this fact, assertible for ecosystems over time, can be also applied to individuals from different species. All of us die, but Darwinian evolution too is no more than a specific way of developing the élan vital in living beings towards greater thermodynamic complexity; a way in which, with many random components, greater complexity of individuals is finally imposed, along with greater specialization in different niches and less individual entropy to be able to survive. Zoltan Arany’s study on the greater metabolic efficiency of living beings in terms of evolution is paradigmatic¹⁵. Individually, we are more energy-efficient than the dinosaurs were, just as they were more efficient than the survivors of the Cambrian explosion. In the end, the second law of thermodynamics always triumphs. Individuals will perish. Fate will decide if a meteorite will bring about a triumphant lineage of metabolically more evolved dinosaurs, or the descendants of some tiny rats, like the modern mammals we are. But in any case the élan vital in the pursuit of greater energy efficiency would always have triumphed in the end. The eternal search for less individual entropy is an inseparable feature of evolution, as is the pursuit of less entropy in biological organization, in the individual ecosystem and even in the biosphere as a whole. In the end, Goethe¹⁶ was wrong: it is not the eternal feminine which drives us forward; it is the pursuit of thermodynamic equilibrium through more energy efficient states.

And if thermodynamic concepts are respected in the most extreme scenarios, why should they not be respected in something as trivial, compared with cosmology or the physics of elementary particles, as social sciences, and specifically, the history of the development of human organizations? No matter how complex, an organization of chains based on the chemistry of carbon, like a human organization, will always be less complex than the universe as a whole or the microcosm of elementary particles. Human history is a constant example where we can see that sometimes, in the face of challenges threatening society, it either reaches a superior level of complexity to overcome the challenges (in an almost Hegelian Aufhebung¹⁷), or fails against them and dies (or vegetates in a lesser level of complexity and energy expenditure). History is full of these alternatives. However, two paradigmatic examples in the face of similar challenges provided opposing responses: one set out in this section, like the collapse of the Ancient Greco-Latin World and another, which can be found at the dawn of the success of our own western civilization, namely the Eurasian crisis of the 14th century. It did not end in collapse but it sowed the seeds for Western Europe’s world domination after the 16th century¹⁸. And yet, it developed in a similar way to the crisis that did indeed end in collapse in the 5th- and 6th-century Mediterranean, even if only because of the appearance of the same final factors: starvation, the Black Death and the depopulation of the land.

A conjunction of factors, especially improving climate conditions, brought about a boom in the agrarian output of Europe in around AD 1000 (as in the rest of Eurasia) and, with it, the social and political complexity of the new western civilization that emerged from the ashes of post-Carolingian feudalism. The population grew and yet, despite a number of improvements in agronomy around AD 1000, there was no real technological revolution. The marginal returns on energy required to till the Montes de Toledo mountain system in Spain or the Massif Central in France were lower than those needed in the fertile Valleys of the Tajo River or the Rhone. The system broke down when the first climate problems arose. Europe’s population may have grown from 40 million to 100 million between 1000 and 1300. However, following the first famines of 1317-1319 and the arrival of the Black Death from Asia in the 1340s, the whole structure foundered and half of its population died. In demographic terms, Europe would not again have the same level of population it had in 1300 until well into the 17th century, and in some areas, even later.

The European political system was on the edge of the abyss, as revealed by the political nature of the Hundred Years’ War, the seigneurial reaction and the peasant (Jacqueries) and religious (Albigensian and Hussite) uprisings. There is only one reason that the structure did not collapse entirely, but managed to resurface in 1450: the happy coincidence of a technological change originating in China (firearms, the printing press, the compass and paper) which restored the profitability of the energy invested in a more complex sociopolitical organization with a global calling. The crisis allowed a marginal purge of the unproductive elements in the system. And once the system was cut back in size, these new technologies allowed it to grow again in a more complex stage.

Because the crisis happened at the same time as a technological change, Europe was able to pass the test, unlike the Mediterranean of classical times. Rome was unable to take the leap that technology gave medieval civilization in the west when marginal productivity began to decline and entropy increased; nor could China or the Islamic world in the 14th and 15th centuries.

Even if it is through spiraling growth and inescapable episodes of decline, in the end, a metabolic optimization of energy efficiency in societies exists in relation to the surrounding resources, just as in ecosystems. In the end, the most metabolically efficient mammals will occupy the ecological niche left by the dinosaurs. Every new civilization that manages to achieve thermodynamic equilibrium in an adult stage of growth will be more energy-efficient than the previous one, provided it achieves greater complexity in its organization. In essence, what the second law of thermodynamics establishes is a new justification to the Hegelian and possibly Marxian dialectic. Every individual civilization that triumphs in this Darwinian evolutionary process is the thesis of this spiraling growth of history. The second law of thermodynamics acts as the antithesis which increases the individual entropy in a civilization. Synthesis is achieved with the individual death of a civilization because the growth in entropy has reached the point of no return, or because of the transformation of civilization (or its self-replication via mutation) into new more complex civilizations with less entropy. It is no oversimplification to say that history is simply the triumph of thermodynamics over voluntarism. Fate or individuals have their role to play. This is true. Could Atahualpa have been captured by half-human, half-horse beasts with slanted eyes, and Peru today speak a dialect of Mandarin? Maybe so. But the spiral of dialectic growth seeking more efficient and complex methods would have been the same; although, instead of Pizarro, Atahualpa’s captor would have been some Ming warrior. The individual protagonists are of least importance. What is really basic and unyielding is this development of the élan vital in pursuit of the Omega Point. This is the only physical law that we can accept as a law, and not as a simile or metaphor.

However, when faced by challenges brought on by a crisis, there is not always a happy ending in evolving towards a more complex organization. Rome is the perfect example as a counterpoint to 14th-century Europe. In the 1st century BC Rome managed to wage conflicts in Asia Minor, conquer Gaul, Mauritania and Celtic Hispania, extend its control of Germania and Britannia and, at the same time, become embroiled in bloody civil wars every 20 years¹⁹. However, in the 3rd century it could no longer defend the Rhine borders, while at the same time responding to the Parthian threat²⁰.

A dynamic is in place that little by little prevails in all societies: the decline in marginal productivity of wealth in hegemonic empires simply as a result of the passing of time; simply as a result of satisfying the second law of thermodynamics.

Faced with an initial crisis, often due to the climate or excessive militarism, at home or abroad, tax-based revenues are unable to sustain the costs of empire. The first solution that any empire looks for is what we today would call currency depreciation, a depreciation of its real value. But soon further steps are taken and what we now call the M3 increases²¹. This leads to more than the depreciation of the currency standard, it can even provoke the depreciation in the value of the entire monetary supply. Supply increases with the use of different financial assets, such as deposits, public loans, derivatives on future income, mortgage certificates on public assets, concessions etc. The result of increased monetary supply is that, while in the short term it balances public finances, in the long term the increase in the money stock above the nominal increase in GDP upwardly adjusted for inflation merely feeds back into inflation.

Indeed, initially, excess liquidity always seems controllable because it is guaranteed by the prestige of the hegemonic power and does not necessarily lead to a decline in consumption. Public consumption through increased military and non-military spending offsets the reduction in private consumption if this occurs. But excess liquidity is dangerous, because the rise in public spending always results in suprastructures that do not influence the feedback from production. The ratio between a complex society’s investment and the returns on this complexity begin to diminish. The mercenarization of the army and the greater technical complexity necessary to defeat enemies who are increasingly familiar with imperial military techniques make it more expensive, even if its size is maintained (which is often not the case). The austerity of the founders of the imperial structure disappears and the costs of a court with increasingly greater protocol begin to become exorbitant. The resulting central civilian bureaucracy increases, as it does on the periphery.

Simple currency depreciation as a way to balance the budget soon becomes useless. Initially, the processes of stagflation (economic depression combined with inflation) occur and the financial prestige of the hegemonic power soon declines. This happened in 3rd-century Rome with the Severan dynasty, in Spain with Philip II and in post-Vietnam United States following Nixon’s abandonment of the gold standard and the Yom Kippur oil crisis. The result is always dangerous inflationary budgetary tensions in which the first item of public expenditure that does not suffer cuts is spending on the military or bureaucracy; it is spending on farming infrastructures that justified the complex society’s energy expenditure on this sociopolitical organization. This means that the ratio justifying energy investment in political suprastructure declines.

But, it is not only public investment, but also private investment that feels the effects in these early moments. Excess liquidity always has an impact on private individuals. Private financial speculation in state assets always turns out to be far more profitable than productive investment. There will always be families like the Fuggers who are ruined by successive imperial bankruptcies. Others will make their fortunes through financial speculation caused by the excess of monetary assets in circulation. This happens even before overtaxation ruins the farming and commercial middle classes and only a lucky few can buy their property at discount prices. However, stagflation will soon not be enough in itself to sustain the empire’s spending. Without a timely structural change in taxation, tax rates per capita gradually begin to rise on an ever shrinking tax base. The spiral begins to form and, once in full swing, it has no limits. The rural farming and commercial urban middle class will collapse and only the strongest will survive: an economic plutocracy that can absorb the wealth of the declining urban and rural middle classes which in turn consume less and less. The economy’s complexity, and, with it society’s, is lost. As we saw in the comparison between the forest biomass and its infinite number of specialized niches and the biomass of unspecialized desert ecosystems, civilization slowly becomes a desert and loses its resilience.

Economic complexity is lost because an immense majority of people is reduced to levels of simple physical subsistence, when the population itself does not begin to decline. This leads to an accelerated decrease in economic biodiversity; and in the social and geographic specialization of labor. At an ever faster pace, industry and commerce are reduced to the long-distance traffic of luxury items, while the bulk of the population is reduced to simple subsistence levels. Cities are abandoned since the countryside is the only place where subsistence can be guaranteed, even if only because formerly free men become legally and physically dependent, as small-holders in a new land ownership system which is concentrated in ever fewer hands and where they are forced to work the land.

This of course reduces the energy efficiency of a complex society. Sociopolitical complexity increasingly has lower benefits for an independent, self-sufficient economy. The issue now is not that the ratio between energy investment and benefits reverting to society begins to be negative in terms of marginal productivity; it will soon be negative in absolute terms. Maintaining sociopolitical complexity now begins to be detrimental to the economic structure.

However, at the beginning of the process, the disappearance of the middle class, leading to progressive plutocratization of the economic infrastructure, is not immediately reflected in the political suprastructure. The power of the imperial court increases, which, compounded by a wariness of greater local power, centralizes the institutions further. The real power resides in the omnipresent central bureaucratic machine that slowly produces a de facto (if not, de jure) suppression of local liberties. The tax system becomes centralized, specifically to limit this power; this in turn leads to less tax efficiency, more corruption, and higher tax rates on shrinking wealth with less visibility on the returns and benefits of this taxation. As this process takes place, two opposing movements finally occur simultaneously caused by overtaxation and the gradual economic impoverishment and concentration of wealth: social revolts and the seigneurial reaction as two sides of the same coin.

Social revolts, such as the medieval Jacqueries of France, the bagaudae of Rome or their Chinese equivalents are phenomena usually championed by the rural middle class that has been forced down the social scale in a short space of time —serfs usually have no consciousness of class to allow them to rebel. The decline of an Empire is usually the froth in which these processes develop. The same happens with the seigneurial reaction. This is another type of response to the centralization of political, military and tax power, when the local élites, the provincial plutocracy that has acquired economic power, realize that they have no political power; that it is in the hands of a distant centralized bureaucracy which does not reinvest the added value obtained from taxation in the territory or on behalf of this territorial plutocracy.

The seigneurial class can react in several ways. It can become a fronde of nobles, and trigger civil wars, under the guise of dynastic or extradynastic wars of succession —but with different provincial territorial bases, as in 4th-century Rome. A family can assume as its own the rights to peripheral public offices and the resulting challenge to the central empire —a frequent occurrence in China and Egypt in the interregnums between dynasties when provincial governors, now seen as heirs, rebelled against the central power. It can foster provincial nationalism with the backing of the local plutocracy. Alternatively, it can support the barbarians who are invading the empire initially in search of a less burdensome accommodation than they had in the imperial structure (provided at least it is seen as a simple legal and political change and not one affecting civilization). In any case, this reaction in the periphery is always a response to the negative ratio between the local contribution to the complex centralized political structure and the amount returned to the local economic structure by the central power. While this process is taking place, the empire is normally harassed in several external arenas at once. Not only will the economic tax base shrink in military terms, the territorial base from which taxes are collected will also shrink.

All this will eventually lead to a desperate attempt to reduce expenditure in order to balance the budget. It is almost like a general rule: first we see the disappearance of social spending (the decline of cities makes a nonsense of extensive panem et circenses –giving the people food and entertainment to keep them content). Cutbacks will then affect farming and communication infrastructures, with, as we have said, the impoverishment of agriculture and commerce. By way of example, in the 3rd century the maintenance of the 83 kilometers of aqueducts linking the Gier and the Rhone (and providing water to Lyon) was abandoned and never rebuilt to bring them back into service²². Finally, it affects internal security. In addition to frequent civil wars, external wars begin to be fought not beyond the borders but within them. Insecurity puts an end to whatever remains of non-maritime trade and the remnants of artisanal complexity or bartering of basic agricultural products based on geographical specialization disappear. Only maritime trade in luxury goods will survive. Stilicho and Aetius fought their battles within the imperial territory, in Gaul or Italy, unlike Julian who beat the Germans in Strasburg at the very borders of the empire on the Rhine. In the end the Ming dynasty fought the Manchus, not in Manchuria or the Korean protectorate that they controlled, but in Beijing itself. Philip V had to win his throne in Almansa and was forced to allow Charles of Austria to enter Madrid twice. The Battle of Britain was fought in the skies above England in 1940, rather than in Quebec, the Crimea or Madhi’s Sudan.

With the loss of internal security, an Empire loses the final glimmer of survival. The ultimate refuge of imperial troops, the idea of legitimacy, disappears. On top of economic breakdown comes the loss of belief in imperial legitimacy. Theologians, like Ambrosius and Augustine, always emerge attempting to justify the accidentality of political forms, in a desire to differentiate the cities of God from the cities of man. But the empire will inevitably fall. Nostalgia for the good old times will only be reborn from its ashes when it is too late: when a few Vandals sack Carthage or Rome. Only then will the idea of imperial legitimacy be reborn, in the form of nostalgia for the complex structure that has been lost. What people living through this collapse feel is not now dread of the unknown consequences of the fall of a political organization, or even fear of the disappearance of a civilization, but terror at the end of Civilization as a concept. But this terror laced with nostalgia for happier days arrives too late. Nostalgia can never pay for armies and the honorable