Ending Today’s Chaos And Repairing America: A New View of Historic Change and Where We Now Are

By Roger Cole

In our modern American society, we find ourselves amidst a disheartening breakdown, where chaos prevails. The dominance of a few corporations stifles diversity across numerous sectors of our economy. Complex and biased laws and tax systems cater to special interests, while the upbringing of many children and the quality of education are skewed towards wealthy areas. Moreover, our online platforms inundate us with fraudulent schemes, adding to the societal disarray.

This thought-provoking book offers a fresh perspective on historical change, presenting the idea that the Western world has undergone three distinct civilizations: the Greco-Roman, the Medieval, and the Enlightenment. With the passing of each civilization, we have witnessed a gradual deterioration of institutions and the erosion of social consensus. Examining the challenges we face today, the book delves into the concept of ‘Justice’ and questions what truly constitutes a fair society. It then presents a range of potential improvements to our current institutions, serving as a temporary measure until a new civilization emerges. Additionally, the book explores America’s place in the global context and delves into the complexities faced by other civilizations experiencing their own periods of institutional breakdown.

By offering a critical analysis of our present state and proposing alternative perspectives, this book provides a guiding light for navigating the turbulent waters of societal transformation. It inspires hope for a future where our institutions can be reimagined, fostering a more just and harmonious society.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Feb 2, 2024
• ISBN: 9798889101512

Roger Cole

After Roger Cole graduated from Brown University in 1962, he began his career with the U.S. Public Health Service. His primary responsibility was to forecast health care demand twenty to thirty years ahead to support the building of new health professions schools to meet future requirements. He also created and developed the Area Resource File [ARF], a database of about 6,000 variables for every county in the U.S., to support the designation of health professions shortage areas. The ARF is now used and supported by over a dozen agencies and departments.

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Introduction

This is a somewhat odd book. It began around 1980, when a son came back from school to tell us of multiculturalism. After a pause to ask myself just what might replace Michelangelo’s Pieta, I began to wonder why the West had developed so differently than China, Islam, and India. I expected to find some books to cure my intellectual itch, but it became clear after some reading that no one had satisfactorily answered the question. So I have read and pondered the question for four decades. Unlike nearly all books on history, this book has been written in solitude as I have not been part of the academic world. My only connection with academic history has been through extensive reading in my spare time amid many other interests. And even this has been stilted by my budget’s refusal to buy the expensive current works.

Many books develop their thesis elegantly and lucidly. This is not one. It has been developed with sections being written in rather random order over the years as my interest has shifted from one issue to another. There is a somewhat coherent Weltanschauung existing beneath the discussions, but it is not brought to the fore because it is more a view of life than a firm set of beliefs as to the proper order of things. Beyond this, the interest here is not prescriptive, it is exploratory. As many of the ideas venture well beyond what is generally considered, there is also a recognized possibility that some—or quite a few—may be harebrained. For all of these limitations, my purpose is for my explorations to help explain why our world today is as it is, what the problems we face are about, and how the values which have defined the West for over two millennia are still relevant. I hope the readers find it as stimulating to read as I have found my 40-year journey of creating it.

Purpose and Approach: The purpose of understanding why the West has had a very different historic path than other major civilizations of the world island—China, India, and Islam—is centered on the West’s extensive change.¹ Western history has had three very different civilizations with transition periods between them. And the book frames the present situation of America as the normal dislocation coming from being in a period of transition between the Enlightenment Civilization and a new, but unknown, civilization yet to come. We are yet another example of Mancur Olson’s contention that ‘all political systems are likely to succumb to sclerosis, mainly because of rent-seeking activities by organized interest groups’.² The historical path of the West has had far more disruptive changes and, as elites have lost control, the West has had more innovation and drastic change than in China, India, and Islam.

The historical interpretation in the book is rather different, as it centers on institutions and causation. Institutions are the persistent social ways which people employ to adapt to the external realities of their life—their laws, customs, social mores, and such. The direct democracy of Greece and the patron-client system of Rome are examples. Some institutions only exist in one civilization while others have continued for a thousand years or more. When external realities change, institutions somewhat adapt. Often they are not able to adapt enough; they begin to function less well and have strange side effects. When ill-functioning institutions accumulate, a civilization decays. Then the society enters a transition period where much of life is uncertain until a new civilization appears with generally accepted new institutions which function well together.

Organization: This volume is a discussion of Western civilizations and particularly America’s situation of decaying institutions. It presents the ideas, describes what is going wrong, and generally explores the idea that our situation today stems from external change eroding the effectiveness of the institutions designed to get us to work together. In places, this analysis may seem like endless carping on what’s going wrong—but it is an attempt to look at the changes in our ways of working together and the forces causing them. The latter part of this volume looks at major changes in institutions which could make things function better. These are not really proposals. Rather they are discussion intended to evoke thinking about how things are done. Similarly, the ending section on a utopia isn’t intended as an actual objective so much as a picture of how much a new civilization could differ from our present.

A second, separate, volume will be a more extensive commentary on the Western civilizations and the transition periods between civilizations. It will have much more detailed analysis of the changes in institutions, external conditions, and civilizations as an approach to thinking about history when it is published later. The ‘Summaries of Past Historical Change’ section below is an abstract of it.

There are some atypical practices in the notation. Where the information can be easily verified with a quick internet search I have avoided footnotes. I footnote when the supporting references are specific and not in common knowledge. After a citation, I have tended to not further footnote statements immediately following unless the specific location is important. Finally, all footnotes are numbered from the start to the end and present on the page where they appear. This is a reaction to having to look up footnotes in the back of the book, having to find the chapter number to locate the note, and then having to go to the bibliography to find the book. I attempt to avoid such a gross imposition on the reader.

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It is only reasonable to compare the West to civilizations with similar access to domesticated animals and plants. This was the foundation of Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997).↩︎

Niall Ferguson; The Great Degeneration (2014); p. 109.↩︎

Concepts and Models of History

Concepts of Historical Change

There are many approaches to history, ranging from the sternly scientific, which eschews placing our values and judgement on the past, to the fully value-laden history of Marx. Scientific history is important for doing the basic field-work of history, establishing the facts of what happened as best we can. The other extreme is also important, however. Almost any history of more than a careful small focus has to reflect the historian’s views and concerns. There are too many facts and interpretations for it to be otherwise. My purpose is to attempt to understand America and the West today in terms of how we got to be how we are. I particularly began with the question of why the West took a very different historical path than the three other civilizations of the world island.

In looking at the extent of Western history, I have decided that the best center of emphasis is upon institutions, following the work of Douglass C. North (Nobel Memorial Prize, 1993), an economist. While North hews closely to neo-classical economic theory, his emphasis is upon the role of social rules and laws in guiding the impact of external changes upon economic change. Since this emphasis is as useful in general history as in economic history, the influence of institutions as the interface between fundamental conditions like weather, geography, economics, and technology on one hand and the actions of people on the other can be used to explain how historic changes occurs.

Western Civilizations and Transitions: Histories customarily treat Western Civilization as a single entity with a series of distinct eras. This has the unfortunate effect of distorting Western history from the outset. The history of the West is unique in its sharp disjunctions. Rather than be a single entity, Western history has been marked by major shifts to periods as distinct from each other as China is from Islam. A better way to look at the West is as a series of three civilizations, each followed by a transition.

All civilizations are coherent, with many communities and groups accepting their relationship to the whole. Their institutions initially functioned well and were accepted by everyone. For example, in the Medieval Civilization the members of the church, the lords and knights, the few merchants, and even the peasants had the same view of how life was structured, how everyone interacted, and accepted the situation as good. After a time, however, external changes led to the institutions functioning less and less well until there was a final disruption as institutions changed to create the new and very different civilization of the Enlightenment.

While the period of formation of a new civilization is rather clear, mostly occurring over less than a century, the demarcation between a civilization and the subsequent transition period is less so. That is because it is a matter of degree. For instance, the Medieval Civilization might be seen to degrade in the early 1300s when money began to replace feudal arrangements, or immediately after the Black Death, when the land/labor balance was upset. Alternatively, the start of the transition might be seen as late as the start of the Tudors when royal power broke the independence of the magnates. The decision is one of weighing the balance between the persistence and effectiveness of some institutions against the clear disruption of others.

The West is seen here as the three civilizations of Rome, the Medieval, and the Enlightenment. Each has been followed by a transition period. We are now in the third transition to a new civilization which will coalesce at an unknown time in the future. While the values and institutions of China, India, or Islam have persisted over long periods, the same is not true for the West. Change in the other civilizations has been gradual and controlled by the elite. Change in the West has been disruptive, eroding the power of elites. This has permitted change to be more extensive, creating new social, economic and political forms.

Consider the difference between Imperial Rome and the Medieval Civilization in France and England: the former’s economy was that of slave agriculture, long-distance ship trade, and a dominant capital supported by tribute. The medieval economy was that of many self-contained manors and the beginnings of new technology. In government, it was the difference between imperial power of Rome and the medieval distributed power of independent barons. Social structure in Rome followed Greek philosophy, while that of the medieval world was the organizing Christian church and independent manors. And the military power of professional legions was totally different from the singular mounted and armored knight. Thus, the civilizations were in no sense the gradual modification and continuation found elsewhere.

The contrast of the medieval world with the Enlightenment Civilization of the early 1700s to the later 1800s is equally dramatic. The economy had moved to world-wide commerce and technology to industrial production. Political organization had moved to nation states. Theocentric Christianity had given way to rationalist humanism spurred by the start of science. Where nearly all relationships in medieval times were personal, in the Enlightenment they were often impersonal, based on offices and law. Finally, military power had moved from the knight to riflemen and artillery and even to hypersonic jet aircraft and atomic weapons.

Now we are in the midst of yet another transition period. Science and technology are recreating our world every generation or two. Not only do we have much lower infant mortality, but as we age we can also expect to live longer—a 20-year-old in 1900 lived 42 years more on average but in 2011 he lived another 57 years.¹ Industry and commerce interact with all corners of the world. Our communities are less effective as people relocate repeatedly and communication moved through the telephone and radio, then TV, and now cable TV and the internet. Military force has evolved to atomic weapons, smart missiles, drones, and the like. The impact of all these changes on our eroding institutions will be discussed later.

The Structure of Civilizations and Historical Change: While my approach to history owes much to the work of Douglass North, it also diverges significantly. North is a historical economist and he is more interested in economic change than someone with a primary interest in history itself.² He also is quite oriented to theory, as economists are prone to be. My concern is much more who we are and how we came to be this way, so there are very substantial differences.

I see institutions more broadly, as cultural tools which help a group of people to deal with the realities of their existence. They include religion, systems of law and social order, and even down to social conventions like honesty, sympathy and duty—in North’s words, The endless struggle of human beings to solve the problems of cooperation so that they may reap the advantages…of [the] human endeavor that constitutes civilization.³ History is littered with persons and changes which shape how we act and think. As Braudel has noted, these are remembered centuries later.⁴ Since institutions function as the interface between people and the external realities they deal with, they are also historically useful but in a less direct way. A change in a key institution means that either the external circumstances or the internals of the social group have changed. When our institutions change, it means that we have changed who we are to some degree. At other times, the external circumstances change but the institutions of the people do not adapt. In these cases, the institutions work less and less well and life becomes difficult for those living under them. As Carl Becker put it in 1941, Technological advance has so accelerated…that present social ills can scarcely be properly diagnosed before they have been so far transformed that the proposed remedies are no longer adequate.⁵ There is a period of confused change until new institutions appear rather quickly to create a new civilization and people settle down into a very different life, better adjusted to the new external circumstances.

North and his collaborators have a much more restricted view of the historical process and its importance to the present. In Violence and Social Orders, he and his co-authors put considerable emphasis on the role of violence, seeing the capacity for violence being distributed throughout the elite in the Natural State.⁶ Second, he emphasizes the importance of institutions in maintaining a coherent state, pointing out that, without general acceptance of the legitimacy and permanence of the social structure, social control becomes a major problem of excessive overhead. Last, he sees England, France, and America as developing three important ‘Doorstep Conditions’ which prepared for their transition from Natural States to Open Access States in the 1800s:

Rule of Law for Elites: the development of legal rights independent of personal relationships.

Perpetually Lived Organizations: organizations like private corporations (the East India Company) and permanent governmental bodies (the Bank of England, the Navy Board) which did not depend upon the presence of particular individuals and relationships.

Consolidated Control of the Military: where the military forces were under one locus of control. Actually, rather than just ‘Military’, the concept should include a range of means of social control, including legal and economic.

[Note that these ‘Doorstep Conditions’ cascade—the non-personal relationships of ‘Rule of Law’ are prerequisite for the ‘Perpetually Lived Organizations’ which are necessary for the ‘Consolidated Control’.]

North’s discussion implicitly considers the West from the later Middle Ages to the present. In contrast, I see the roots of the present in America going back to the formation of Judaism and the rationalism of Greece. Our institutions have shifted and developed but their form is rooted in the past. History has strong path dependence, as the possible new institutions are limited by what the present institutions are and how they have developed from yet earlier institutions. While North’s Doorstep Conditions were certainly critical to radical changes in the Enlightenment in England, they are only part of the past of our present. The view here is that a number of broad areas of institutions have led us to here. For instance:

Communication and the accumulation of knowledge through books, universities, printing, and on to the internet. This area includes logic, algebra, and science. It also includes the evolution of English to a different, more flexible, language.

Law and government stemming from the concepts of property and the individual and extending to the institution of a representative republic. This area includes the major institutions of Republicanism and Liberalism.

Money and commerce leading to corporations, public debt, and the complex economy. A key institution here is the idea of the role of the market, including faith in the ‘invisible hand’ to allocate resources through prices.

Accordingly, the West’s institutions are seen as reaching back into the ancient world. And the historical change in external conditions upon these institutions is traced from there. Western history is seen as the elites losing control of change in the collapse of the Greco-Roman Civilization and they have never been able to regain it. Conditions have continually led to further destabilizing forces.

Identity Economics and Civilizations: A bit before 2000 a new subarea of Behavioral Economics started to develop, Identity Economics. A paper by Paul Collier of Oxford gives a good overview of this new area.⁷ The central concept is that an individual’s creation of a personal identity can be thought of as a marketplace for sorting out the individual’s allegiance to the social groups the individual is associated with. With some extensions, Identity Economics’ concepts provide a useful framework for thinking about civilizations and the disruptions which lead to transitions to different civilizations. Just as the breakdown of institutions disrupts key activities, the breakdown of a common identity through population groups taking on disparate identities disrupts social capital. This exacerbates institutional and community breakdown.

To start with the central ideas of Identity Economics, individuals have several ties to social groups normally. A person has family ties, ties to their work and profession, ties to a church and some social groups, and ties to their geographic area ranging from their neighborhood to their nation. Belonging to a social group generates self-esteem for the individual through esteem from other members of the joined group and through esteem from other people for being a member of the joined group. Belonging and the self-esteem generated are valued in the individual through a utility function specific to the person. The individual forms their personal identity through giving differing allegiances to the several groups they have ties to. This is ‘who they are’. They allocate their internal allegiance to social groups to provide themselves with the most internal self-esteem.

Initially an individual’s ties to social groups and their personal identity are formed as they grow up in a family. Often this identity stays with them throughout their life. For other individuals, their life events, such as advanced education, cause changes in their interactions with society and their personal sense of identity. Looking from the side of the groups, they confer esteem to the individual for their compliance with the norms of the social group. And typically these norms have an underlying reciprocal trust that each member will contribute effort to the group’s activity. Adam Smith recognized this as his second level, reciprocal obligation in what his considered his major work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments.⁸

Paul Collier’s analysis of social divergence through class formation looks at esteem in economic terms, linking it to income, and only looks at individuals in terms of ties to social groups. This is obviously a significant simplification of reality. We really have a number of ties to different social groups and the esteem benefits are not always related to income. Many occupations involving caring for others (charitable work and ministries, for instance) get far more overall esteem than their salaries measure.

Collier does not particularly discuss the development of relatively isolated, lower-esteem individuals. There are many indications that the numbers of this group are increasing. This is politically and socially important. Studies of juvenile gangs have found that they can reach out to youths with weak social connections and low self-esteem and be rewarded with exceptionally strong, almost fanatical allegiance. People need the esteem of others. Political movements similarly draw people in with the sense of being part of something terribly important. Mass rallies are part of this. Totalitarian political parties rely both on mass rallies and on forming close local connection of the parties to adherents. They also attempt to minimize other possible community and group ties by eroding intermediate social organizations—which is why they are termed totalitarian. This is an important area of research for Identity Economics because people with low self-esteem are a political powder keg and we need to know how recruitment affects their self-esteem, their social choices, and their behavior.

An important component in history is the extent to which socially active persons have degraded ties to groups and weak identities. Initially, a civilization pulls together as nearly all of the socially active members take on identities, obtaining esteem and other benefits from the social role of their identity. The institutions of the civilization are the organizing of these relationships. When external conditions make the institutions less effective, several things can happen:

One is that the institutions change to retain their effectiveness. Alternatively, new institutions can develop to deal with the new external situation, but these institutions may not be fully effective.

Another is that a part of the population gradually shifts to new identities. An example of this is the rise of the international merchant in England during the 1600s and the rise of professional identities in America recently. This fragmentation of identities and allegiances generally makes the institutions less effective. Efforts to make society work better lead to more complexity, increasing the social overhead of governance. At the same time, societies are becoming more wealthy, allowing greater social overhead.

A third result is that more people become socially marginalized, with poor ties to groups, weak allegiances, and little self-esteem. Sometimes these people move to ties to new groups and this can happen rapidly. An example is the Fundamentalist Christian movement around 1900 in America by people unaccepting of the mainstream Protestant churches’ accommodation with science. At other times, large numbers of socially marginalized people create an explosive base for demagogues. Germany’s hyperinflation in the 1920s greatly eroded peoples’ self-esteem, creating a base for the Nazi movement.

The presidential campaign of Donald Trump is an illustration of the large-scale appeal to the socially marginalized. Rural areas feel overlooked and unappreciated in American culture generally, but the sense of low esteem is particularly strong in whites without education beyond high school. The allegiance strength of Donald Trump’s ‘base’ is remarkable, and it comes from his giving a sense of importance to them. While Donald Trump is not a threat of totalitarian politics because our institutions are still holding, the response to him should give us warning of the risk of populist’s appeals. In the 1930s, the strongest movements were Huey Long and Father Coughlin on the extreme political right. FDR defused that situation; it is unclear how we can defuse situations in our future if populists can continue to attract large bases of adherents.

Identities and Civilization Change: Turning to the histories of civilizations, the creation of personal identities can be seen as playing a major part in the process of change. What we think of as civilizations have all been built upon the socially active population having rather uniform personal identities. That is, most of the people involved in the general social activities have thought of themselves as having similar ties to the organizations and institutions of the civilization. In early Principate Rome, the citizens rather uniformly thought of themselves as Romans, with only secondary ties to their family, geographic areas, and such. In the Medieval Civilization, the bulk of the socially active population was in the nobility, the knights, and the church—and they all saw the structure of the world similarly, with similar allegiances to their religion and their manor. The merchants in towns were too few and too marginal to affect life, and most people were very poor and not socially active. This common orientation or the elites allowed a civilization to pull together just after 1050. Then, four hundred to five hundred years later, led by the long-distance trading elite, the Enlightenment Civilization came together as the upper half of the population—those socially active—began to see their world as rational, perfectible, and organized in commercial markets. There was near universal adoption of the precepts of Republicanism and then Liberalism in Britain and America, even as Republicanism remained the dominant view of American society.

In the process of gradual breakdown of civilizations, an important part of the process is the decline of uniform identities, through the creation of new populations with different identities. A good part of the identity of individuals comes from their economic situation and social role. These are relatively stable over time. However, when a part of the socially active population receives declining esteem and economic benefits they often seek to restore their self-esteem with new allegiances providing greater esteem benefits. Social movements in particular provide esteem unrelated to economic benefits. These involve strong emotional commitment, such as evangelical religions and political movements like Fascism and Communism. Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer (1951) describes this process. They are a symptom of a civilization breaking down and fragmenting into many different social identities. This leads to continual social unease and discord.

In the Greco-Roman Civilization, the recognition of Greek as an official language was followed by distinct differences between the eastern and western parts of the empire. Then the split of the empire and the Germanic invasion left the western part of the empire totally fragmented into different identities. The rise of Christianity only split things further. The Medieval Civilization came as peasants learned to firm the deep, rich soils of Gaul effectively. Next, the Medieval Civilization was very gradually eroded by merchants and commerce as city populations thought of themselves as very different from the manors and money exchange replaced Medieval institutions. As society developed with royal power, universities, and middle-class artisans even more people saw themselves outside of the Medieval worldview. Finally, a new consensus pulled together which was the rationally-oriented, commercial Enlightenment Civilization. The new general view was that the world centered on commerce, rational thinking, human improvement, and wide social and political participation.

During the Third Transition, which we are in now, social cohesion and divided identities were only a minimal problem in the years before the Great Depression. True, the Fundamentalist Christians took on a very distinct identity, but they basically withdrew from general society as much as they could, so this was not disruptive. The Depression and FDR’s programs mostly pulled people together, albeit with a small dissent which saw his programs as an attack on all that was Liberalism. This did not matter much because, unlike Europe, America still was much more Republican than Liberal.

World War Two further unified the nation and the effect lasted into the 1960s, when everything began to become unstuck. The vast increase in higher education and the geographic isolation which developed with the suburbs led most of the more successful to think of themselves as having a professional identity first. Civil Rights brought the repressed Black population into being socially active and they thought of themselves as Blacks first. Evangelical Christianity grew rapidly and stayed socially active, bringing the Fundamentalists into more general social participation in the process. These Americans thought of themselves first in terms of their religion. The growing immigration from Latin America led to a people who thought of themselves as Hispanic first. And White Americans, particularly outside of the cities, even began to think of themselves with a somewhat distinct identity—and began to feel less central to America’s identity than they had.

America is experiencing the negative social effects of multiple populations with differing identities. If one looks at education, urban-rural, religion types, and racial background alone, America is fragmenting into dozens of different identity groups. And many are seeing themselves as excluded and marginalized. Most particularly, people stopped thinking of politics as a continuum, where the more conservative and the more liberal worked together to improve America for all. Before 2000, the parties—particularly Republicans—moved further apart and saw the national good as tied only to their own program. Political war is now normal.

All Models Are Wrong: A recent discussion of market forecasts made an interesting statement, All models are wrong, but some are useful.⁹ What this says is that any model we use is an abstraction from reality and as such leaves out tons of important information. Inevitably some of the information left out will be quite important and the model will be wrong. On the other hand, statisticians have learned that one can add more and more elements to one’s model and get it to track past change very well, but when one does this the model can be very inaccurate in forecasting future change. This error is called ‘over specification’ and the answer is to use as few terms in one’s model as possible. If you want to look at the impact of more factors, make multiple models with only a few factors rather than one model with many factors. This, of course, only applies to quantified models. The assessment of history presented here sees western civilization as a series of three distinct civilizations. The idea of an ‘historical path’ is considered to be quite important with what has happened as quite constraining on what can happen next.

The listing above is basically a model of change in history. Its purpose is to organize information and highlight why some information is particularly important. In the second volume of detailed historical analysis, there are many periods where aspects of change normally minimized are presented as important. The analysis and the approach in these analyses will inevitably be partially wrong. Hopefully it will be useful in highlighting the central role of institutions and personal identities.

The Model Here: Before continuing, it may be useful to pull together the thoughts above into a clearer model of historic change in societies.

A civilization is the relating of people, their communities, and the institutions of the communities to the external factors of their life in a way generally understood, accepted, and approved of by the socially active population.

The external factors are everything outside of the society’s communities and interactions of their people. They include the weather, the geography and its resources, the existing infrastructure and other physical investment, the overall wealth, the level of knowledge and technology, and similar factors not part of communities and their institutions.

There are many communities within the society. Social communities include neighborhoods, churches, schools, and social groups. Economic communities include farms, fisheries, and firms of all types and their organizations. Political communities begin with the nation with its lower-level components, political parties, and the like. Each community has institutions—laws, rules, and customs, even habits—to coordinate and control the interactions of people with each other and the external environment. In a solid civilization, the underlying view of the world and logic of institutions are similar across communities. As a civilization breaks down institutions become more dissimilar between communities. Dissociative communities, where groups within them relate to different institutions, are particularly uncomfortable for members.

People in the society derive their perceived identity from their association with the communities, giving different allegiance and receiving esteem and tangible benefits from their mix of ties to them.

The social capital of the society comes from the degree to which its social-active population has a high commitment to their communities and their values. Having similar values, people trust others within and without their communities. This enables the society to function smoothly. Internal conflict within and between communities greatly reduces overall social capital, causing mistrust and hostility.

The social depth of the society—the proportion of people socially active—and the absolute number of people influence the degree of change in external conditions. More people and a higher proportion exercising an independent social role bring more talent and innovation to the collective life. At the same time, they also increase the complexity of the communities, their institutions, and their interactions. The social mobility allowed in society leads to more homogeneity in its communities. But with greater social mobility people cluster (‘birds of a feather flock’) to better fit their communities and the number of communities increases, leading to greater institutional differences between communities.

Historic change occurs as external conditions change and this leads the institutions of the society’s communities to less effectively relate people to the external world and each other. To some degree the communities may adapt their institutions to the new external factors—but such changes are normally limited and not fully effective. For the most part, however, communities work less well with each other as the old institutions are less effective. In particular, communities fragment and people see others as different from them and as living by different standards and rules. This erodes the trust which underlies social capital. Nearly all historic change works within the confines of the historic past (What has been limits what can be).

Occasionally, however, there is a different process. People and their communities collectively take on new ways of doing things—new institutions—which are much more effective in organizing human activities in changed external conditions. This is the situation when a new civilization appears.

Thus far new civilizations have appeared with the appearance of new communities—social, economic, or political—which provide an organizational center for new institutions. In the Greco-Roman Civilization, the new communities were the patron-client structure and then the Principate, in the Medieval Civilization it was the centralized Catholic Church and self-defending manors, and in the Enlightenment Civilization it was the international traders of England.

For a period, the civilization functions particularly effectively because there is near universal commitment to the communities and acceptance of their institutions. Then external conditions change further and the society starts to move away toward a transition to another new civilization as institutions gradually function less well.

The external conditions which drive social change cover all sorts of things. Over the past two millennia the most important has been the gradual, and now very rapid, increase in our knowledge and our technological abilities. This has led to vast changes in our societal wealth, the size of our population, and the number and complexity of our communities. Changes in the neighboring peoples and nations are important, including the shift of a culture to a new geographic area such as happened when European culture transferred to England before the Medieval era or when colonists moved to North America. An occasionally important type of external condition has been the environment, with historic shifts in weather patterns and now the new element of global warming.

The functioning of communities and their institution affect individuals in turn. In a civilization, everyone has similar beliefs and the communities’ institutions vary little from each other. This allows people to see society as a unified whole and people function better. As external changes stress a civilization the different communities within it start to have institutions with different belief foundations. This creates stresses on the individuals as the institutions of the different communities of which they are a member conflict. In extreme situations such individuals experience feelings of isolation, low personal worth, and anomie, which greatly erode their community participation, creativity, and social contribution.

Obviously this rough outline of the analytic model here is nowhere near any efforts at quantification. It is more the logical structure used to look at historical change and its causation. The external conditions of knowledge/technology and social wealth have changed much more rapidly in the past 150 years and their pace of change is accelerating. This is putting extraordinary pressure on our institutions and we will need to understand what is happening if we are to avoid a very difficult future.

Recent Theories of History

Historians have analyzed history in terms of major forces causing repetitive cycles for many years. The model proposed here is also cyclical, albeit with very long and variable cycles. In the past decade, there have been several historical analyses seeing repeating cycles which are of interest. Each of the five discussed below centers upon different factors underlying change, but each in turn has good tracking with events. Before looking at the recent models, however, a brief look at Kondratiev is in order.

The Old Kondratiev Technology Theory: Back in the early 1920s, the Russian Nikolai Kondratiev proposed a cyclical theory of technologies. He argued that Western technology moved in 40-to-60-year cycles. From back then, he saw three cycles: (1) the Cotton and Steam Engine, (2) the Steel and Railroad, and (3) the Electrification and Chemistry. Since his proposal many others have developed further versions of it, one even extending his model back to Sung China. The core idea in that there are core technologies which spin off many other technological applications. His model and the others following it have two odd features; they postulate a single sequence and the cycles are of similar length. As a result, Kondratiev and his successors twist history quite a bit.

Another way of looking at his type of economic cycle is to see each core technology as unique and allow clearly distinct technological families to overlap in time. The logic is that when a major new technology appears, many secondary and related technological applications follow. As the most obvious and important applications come first, there is a period where society benefits from major productivity gains. Then there are following periods where important, but lesser, applications are found. Finally there is a period where new applications are minor and the technology reaches its productive end. In this approach, mechanical cloth weaving was the first core technology. It began with human power, moved to water power, and then to steam power. It employed cotton first and then moved to other types of yarn. Its cycle was fairly short because it had few spin-off technologies. It overlapped with the second technology, steam power engines, and it was these which allowed vast increases in British productivity. Steam engines also had a wide range of spin-off technologies. When they improved to provide continuous rotary power, they had many factory applications unrelated to cloth. They included railroads because steam engine power was the key to their having a huge social and economic role.

Each core technology has its own cycle length, depending upon the extent of further technology uses of it, although most do fall in the 40-to-60-year cycle Kondratiev proposed. But as the science culture progressed in the 1900s, there were more and more core technology cycles going on at the same time. With enough effort, it would be possible to look at the appearance of many key technologies and their interaction and impact on society. Kondratiev was also interested in social impacts, but his thought here is far less interesting, being based upon his sequence of single technologies.

Anglo-American Historic Cycles: William Strauss and Neil Howe have written several bothersome books, the most recent is The Fourth Turning.¹⁰ Cyclical theories of history have been around for well over a century and never have seemed to generally track what has happened.¹¹ But while there are some problems with the logic and cycles of Strauss and Howe, the general cyclical pattern holds. Since their cycles do generally fit with what has happened it is worthwhile taking a look at them.

The Strauss-Howe approach looks at two periodic happenings. The first is an Ideological Era when there is great attention to concepts of what matters—values. The second is a resolution era when social issues come to a head and are resolved. Within each cycle, there are consistent patterns. They identify six periods where these patterns play out and describe the process:

Note that the first four are about a century apart and that they are religion centered. While the Transcendental Awakening was a general religious revival, this was also the period when the Abolitionists and the southern separatists each prospered. As the Enlightenment Civilization reached its peak, the first secular ideological expressions appeared. The latter two ideological periods come after shorter time periods and have multiple expressions, but they are predominantly secular. The Progressive Era had a main theme of liberal government reform but it is also the period when Protestant fundamentalism appeared in America. The 1960s in America was even more varied, with the hippies making love not war, feminists declaring war, and the beginnings of the Libertarian movement, among others. The second type of periodic happening they see is what they call ‘Crisis Periods’ but seem more appropriate to refer to as Resolution Eras—that is, periods when prior struggles are resolved. They see seven such periods, roughly separated from the ideological eras by fifty years. The one exception is the period around the American Civil War when patterns are disrupted. The seven periods which Strauss and Howe see are:

Note that these periods are not particularly war periods, so much, as times of resolution. The victory of Henry the VII settled the issue of royal legitimacy, The Armada Crisis settled England as a Protestant nation, The Glorious Revolution established the Parliament as sovereign, and so forth.

The most interesting aspect of the Strauss-Howe model is its interior dynamics. They see a stable pattern of four successive generational types, with each type forming its outlook in reaction to its parents’ type and the dominant social outlook in the period when they were growing up. The four generational types in the order they appear [Note: using different names than Strauss-Howe] are: the Value generation, the Self-centered generation, the responsible Doer generation, and the other-oriented Conciliator generation. The way these generations happen is:

The Value generation has an indulged childhood in a stable, structured society. Its parents are of the Conciliator generation which has relatively weak values. The Value generation reacts to see values as very important and stable society gives it security to do so.

The Self-centered generation grows up largely ignored by Value parents seeking to change the world. They react by taking care of themselves in a somewhat stressful society with conflicts. They are somewhat cynical about values.

The Doer generation grows up in a protected, but not indulged, childhood in a society with mixed, confused values. They react by being practical and doing what needs to be done, rejecting their parents’ selfishness.

The Conciliator generation grows up rather over-protected in a society which is coming together as to what is important. Their reaction is to optimistically work with others, accepting the widespread views as to what’s right.

These inter-generational dynamics are not universal, of course. They are more the general environment which influences everyone to some degree. And the overall effects come from the combined interaction of the four generation types within a period.

Let’s start with the Cultural High Era. The young adults are the Conciliators and the midlife adults are the Doers. This period comes after the solving of a major conflict and has strong social cohesion and general prosperity.

Next comes the Ideological Era. It comes when the young adults are the values generation and the midlife adults who run things are the Conciliators. By their nature, they tend to let the young adults run wild a bit with their strong views. The elders who are more advisors are Doers, who mostly try to maintain some balance in society. In these periods, ideas are central and social cohesion weakens.

Third, the Individualist Era appears. In this period, the self-centered generations are young adults and the values generation is in midlife and running things. Generally everyone goes their own way and major splits in society appear.

In the Resolution Eras, the young adults are the Doers, the pragmatic, accepting foot soldiers looking for responsibilities. The midlife adults who run things are the self-centered generation which has moved on from its young self-absorption to pragmatically run things. The elder adults are the values generation, who look for a stable orientation toward what’s important, hopefully becoming more wise as they age. This period sees the resolution of prior conflicts.

To look at the attractions of the Strauss-Howe model, these come in how well these eras fit and help make the recent past understandable.

The Gilded Age from the end of the Civil War to the late 1880s was a Cultural High. The issue of slavery and the issue of the nation versus state’s rights had been resolved and America settled down into westward expansion, railroads, industrialization, and the exploitation of the land’s vast natural resources. Everyone prospered.

The Progressive Era from the late 1880s into the first years of the 1900s was an Ideological period. Labor unions appeared, with multiple strikes. William Jennings Bryant’s ‘Cross of Gold’ highlighted agrarian protest, the Fundamentalist Protestant churches split from the mainstream, and the muckrakers and progressive reformers took on the ills of government—corruption, big city machines, and the huge industrial trusts.

The World War I Era from just before 1910 to 1929 was an Individualistic period where most people pursued their own ends and society fragmented. Some of the crusades were Prohibition, the League of Nations, and Women’s Suffrage—each with its adherents. But this was also the period of Flappers and fun, as well as business being very profitable and a major financial boom. Class inequality grew quite wide.

The Depression Era (and World War Two) was a time of Resolution. It ran from 1930 to 1947 or so. The stock market crash led to the New Deal and its struggles to get the economy back to an even keel. America decided that the economy couldn’t be trusted to selfish business. Then Pearl Harbor and the Second World War pulled the nation together to an unprecedented degree.

The American High period ran from just after World War Two to the early 1960s and was another ‘Cultural High’ period like the Gilded Age. The economy boomed, the middle class grew strongly, and everyone prospered. The governments took a larger role as suburbs blossomed, interstates highways were built, and more laws and regulations governed the activities of businesses.

The Values Revolution period came in the mid-1960s and lasted to the mid-1980s. It was a major ‘Ideological’ era, but even more than the Progressive era it reflected a wide range of values being promoted. The Yuppies and anti-war movements were one facet, so were the feminists, the Silent Spring Environmentalists, the Black Power movement, and urban and campus strife. In religion, the Evangelical Christians became the major dissenters from the major denominations, just as the Fundamentalists had in the Progressive era. In politics, the extreme Libertarians became a force as part of the Reagan Revolution.

The Social Retreat era came in the mid-1980s and extended into the mid to late 2010s. It was an ‘Individualistic’ period like the period before the Depression. The Reagan Revolution started the process of shrinking the federal government and shifting taxes away from the most wealthy and corporations. Businesses took the view that their only duty was to maximize their income—the idea that they had other stakeholders was exiled. They worked at reducing their employee cost burden with part-time and temporary employees and cut back retirement obligations. Economic inequality rapidly grew and communities segregated into economic uniformity.

The authors foresaw a Millennial Crisis period coming in the 2005-to-2025-time frame and expected it to be a ‘Resolution’ era. Obviously they saw it coming too soon. Still, there