The militarization of the Western Empire: How the COVID pandemic accelerated the process

 

Donald Trump may not have been not such a warlike emperor as previous Western Emperors have been (and probably will be). But, even assuming that Trump is trying to avoid wars, he cannot oppose the militarization trends of the Western economy that was boosted by the COVID-19 epidemics. 

 

History repeats itself - oh, yes! And sometimes it repeats itself so fast and so ruthlessly that it leaves you out of breath. Think of what's happening right now: the COVID; the lockdowns, the face masks, the limitations to movements: all that happened in a few months, and the world of last year looks so remote that it could be seen as part of the still ongoing Middle Ages. 

And, yet, there is some logic in what has happened. History may surprise you and it usually does (the only sure thing we learn from history is that people never learn from history). But whatever happens in history has a reason to happen. And what we are seeing is not unexpected. We have seen it already, stark clear and unavoidable: it is the militarization trend of a decaying society.

Let's go back to the Roman Empire, as always the paradigmatic story of a state that went through a full cycle of growth and collapse. The Roman world was not so technologically sophisticated as ours, but the basic needs of the citizens were the same and the Roman government provided many of them. You may have heard the expression "Panem et Circenses" (bread and circus games). That described two of the services that the Roman state ensured: the shipment of  wheat from Africa to the Roman cities and the various kind of games performed in the amphitheaters. 

But there was much more than that. The state built and maintained the roads that connected the different regions of the empire. It built and maintained the aqueducts that carried water to the cities. It took care of the coinage needed for the financial system that made commerce possible. Then, the main service was security: the government provided an internal justice system that guaranteed a certain degree of social security to the free citizens. The Romans also maintained an urban police (the vigiles) that served also as firefighters. And, as we all know, the legions were the backbone of the Roman society, in war and in peace. 

Of course, the Roman state had all the defects that states often have: it tended to harass, oppress, humiliate, rob, and overtax its citizens, But the Romans normally believed that a bad government was much better than no government, so they put up with a lot of stress as long as they could. Unfortunately for them, collapse was unavoidable. As the Empire's finances declined, the government became unable to pay for the services it had been providing.

The loss of government services in the Roman state was a complicated process that went on for centuries, sometimes gradually and sometimes in bumps. Coinage declined with the decline of the silver and gold mines and, by the 3rd century, commerce started declining, too. We have evidence that the Roman roads were already decayed so much that they were unusable by the early 5th century. Many aqueducts were in ruin by that time and that probably contributed to the depopulation of large cities: nobody can live in a city without working sewers. The last gladiatorial game in the Colosseum, in Rome, is recorded in 438 CE. Wheat was still shipped to Rome from Africa up to ca. 450 AD, but no later and, most likely, the other Roman cities in Europe had lost the supply of wheat from Africa much earlier. The loss of the supply of food was the last straw that sent the Empire to the dustbin of history a few decades later. 

But note an important detail: During the declining phase, the Roman government always gave maximum priority to maintaining its military potential intact. The data show that  Roman troops kept increasing in numbers up to the end of the 3rd century. We lack data for the last phase of decadence of the Western Empire, but we know that the Romans still kept armies and were paying for the maintenance of the walls defending the empire up to the early 5th century. As decline continued, the Western Empire was reduced to a giant machine that collected taxes and produced legions. The result was that even a terribly weakened Empire could put up a decent fight up to nearly the last moment of its existence. Just think of how a ragtag Roman army still managed to defeat Attila's Huns at the battle of the Catalaunian Plains in 451 AD. It was at the same time the last battle and the last victory of the Empire.

Now, let's move forward of about 1,600 years and we are in our times. The modern Western Empire has many points in common with the old Roman Empire although, of course, the range of services the state provides nowadays is much larger. Just think that the Romans had nothing like our public education system, not our public healthcare service. But, like the Roman state, the modern Western states provide food, water, transportation infrastructures, security, and entertainment. And, of course, a heavy military apparatus supposed to defend citizens from external invasions. 

Today, the West is in a situation similar to that of the Roman Empire at the start of its declining phase. With the economy tethering on the edge because of the gradual depletion of natural resources, there are many things that the Western governments can't afford anymore. You don't have to think that the imperial elites are especially smart, but they understand perfectly well the situation: the Western Empire can survive only as long as it can have access to exploit the resources it needs. And most of these resources are located in faraway places that are hugely expensive to control. Crude oil in the Middle East is a good example. In the competition for the world's resources, the West faces a giant and growing power: the Eurasian block, much better placed in terms of still available resources within its local sphere of influence. 

Right now, the West is still in an aggressive posture in military terms, but the leaders may decide to settle into a defensive position and hold on as long as possible. In either case, the Empire needs enormous amounts of resources to keep alive its overblown and inefficient military system. Because of this, some Western leaders may well be reckless enough to try something desperate, such as attacking Russia (preferably in winter, as it has been fashionable in the past). More easily, these resources can be found by taking them from other sectors of the Western economy. If you like to see the empire as a beast of prey, it is starting to eat itself.

Curiously, it has been the coronavirus crisis that pushed the process to accelerate at an unexpected speed. In less than one year, we saw the collapse or the rapid decline of several infrastructures that we were taking for granted up to now. Note that I am not saying that the virus was engineered on purpose in some military lab -- that's extremely improbable, to say the least. I just mean that the elites of the Western world are an opportunistic predator: they jump on whatever opportunities they can find. And there is no doubt that they exploited the coronavirus crisis to their own maximum advantage.

The first and the most illustrious victim of the virus scare was international mass tourism. The collapse  will probably be irreversible: read any description of what is today to visit Disneyland while wearing masks and keeping distances and you'll understand why. Mass tourism was unsustainable anyway, but the speed of its fall has been amazing.

Also, the collapse of the civilian airlines is well advanced and of much of the industry that produces private cars. They were all very expensive infrastructures that consumed a lot of resources for little purpose. Their collapses are taking with them the fossil fuel industry, but that's not a problem for the military. The remaining production can now be re-directed to military uses. 

Then, we have the rapid decline of the public education system. It had been already declining for a long time, but the pandemic showed how fragile is a system that costs a lot of money to the state and produces little that's useful. Do we really need to teach ordinary people how to read and write? They don't need that to play on TikTok and most of them are too fat to be useful as soldiers. All that we need is highly specialized technologists able to design and build weapons and top-level managers to handle the levers of the government machine. And that's where the remaining resources will be concentrated. 

How about the healthcare system? That, too, was badly hit and turned out to be terribly ineffective in stemming the first wave of the pandemic. One possible reaction would have been to strengthen the system with a badly needed injection of capital and a re-organization for better efficiency. But it was not done. Here, propaganda played its usual role in convincing people that what's bad for them is good for them. Have you ever heard a slogan like "fewer tanks and more hospitals?" Can you imagine one of the presidential candidates stating something like that? Of course not. 

Propaganda has been able to convince people that, if the healthcare system was unable to manage a problem that never was really overwhelming, it was not because the system was badly mismanaged and turned into a profit-making operation for a few fat cats at the top. No, it was the fault of the people who didn't wear their face masks or didn't wear them right. The pen is mightier than the sword when it is used to write propaganda.

And there we are: suddenly we find ourselves rapidly moving along a road that we hadn't realized we had taken. The system is moving to a condition that will eventually turn it into a mirror of what once was the Roman empire: a giant machine that collects taxes and produces legions.

And then what? Of course, the Empire will crumble. All empires do. They bankrupt themselves with excessive military expenses, they are like the fat man of the restaurant scene of the Monty Python (if you haven't seen it, it is here). And in our case, things will go even faster than in the past because we face not only resource depletion but also the collapse of the ecosystem. 

But history goes in cycles: there is no collapse that's not followed by a rebound. We don't know exactly what the world after the crash will be like, but after the great binge of fossil fuels is over, and with it the toxic dreams of dominance, we might be able to build a gentler and better world. And may the Goddess help us in this difficult task.

Polyphonic Music and the Angst of the West: A Christmas Post

Sicut Cervus, by Pierluigi da Palestrina, published in 1604. It sings Psalm 42 of the Vulgata Bible. Maybe this old motet can be seen as a Christmas gift from the Western culture to the rest of humankind

(reposted from "Chimeras")

With the waning of the Middle Ages, Europe was coming out of a terrible period. The crusades had ended with a series of crushing defeats and the tremendous war effort had backfired, generating famines and the black death pandemics that killed more than 100 million Europeans. It is estimated that around 45–50% of the population perished, in some areas probably closer to 75–80%.

Yet, Europe rebounded from the disaster -- perhaps because of it. As I described in a previous post, with the 15th century the European population restarted growing, faster than before. It was probably because it could find intact natural resources that the previous collapse had left free to regrow: forests and arable land.

The 15th century was the time of the Renaissance, an age that was the start of the incredible expansion that led Western Europe to dominate most of the world after a few centuries of conquests. But the tumultuous expansion was not without internal struggle: every European state wanted a slice of the overseas bounty. Eventually, the competition would generate the great struggles of the 17th century, with Europe turning against itself with the 30-years war, the witch-burning age, and other disasters. Much before that happened, the older European cultural unity had been lost: Latin, the old universal language that had bound Medieval Europe together, was rapidly losing ground. It wasn't needed anymore.

But, before disappearing, Latin had a last moment of glory. It was the age of polyphonic music in Western Europe, a kind of delicate, sophisticated, intricate, incredibly beautiful kind of music never seen before in the world. Not that polyphony didn't exist before, it was possibly the most ancient kind of music in human history. But the Western European version that lasted from ca. 1400 to 1600 CE, was something different. Earlier on, Gregorian music -- monophonic -- had been mostly an embellishment of the sacred Latin words of the Bible. With polyphony, music asserted itself in an age when Latin was not understood anymore.

To be sure, polyphonic music was still sung in Latin and it often had religious subjects, but it was a completely different story. It was an expression of the European willingness to expand into new realms. Just in the same way as the European galleons were exploring new lands, European polyphonic music was exploring new harmonies and new ways of communications: lacking a shared language, music had to come to the rescue. Polyphonic music could be religious, but it was not necessarily so. It could take the form of a madrigal, a secular kind of music.

For some two centuries, a new harmony, never heard before, resonated in Europe. Then, as the political struggle became harsher and wider, polyphony gave way to symphonic music, better suited to the tragic and violent age that started with the great carnage of the 30-years war and expanded all the way to the disasters of the two world wars of the 20th century. It lasted until English became the new universal language. With English, music could become again linked to the human voice and to words that could be understood. A modern genre such as the rap is, after all, a return to the Gregorian approach to music as an embellishment of human language. 

Today, polyphonic music is still alive and well as a religious form of music in Eastern Europe, but it is a relic of a bygone time in Western Europe and in all the regions that recognize themselves under the wide label of "The West." Yet, we can still appreciate the technical mastery of the composers of that time, one of them was Pierluigi da Palestrina, who composed Sicut Cervus, from Psalm 45 of the Bible.

Actually, the Sicut Cervus is not just a beautiful harmony, it is something more. Its theme is a thirsty deer looking for water. It says, “Sicut cervus desiderat ad fontes aquarum, ita desiderat anima mea ad te Deus.” Which you can translate as: “As a deer longs for a spring of water, so my soul longs for you, oh God.” And that, I think, can express the burning desire of the West, the angst for something that Westerners themselves don't understand but have been seeking for centuries with such a reckless enthusiasm that they set half of the world on fire. And, whatever it was that they were seeking, it seems clear that they didn't find it. Today, the parable of the Western world domination seems to be mostly concluded, even though it still flares here and there. But there remains to us something distilled from so much ardor, the music of a remote age when our ancestors had managed to create something eerie and beautiful that we can still admire, today: polyphonic music.

I noted in a previous post how all human cultures have treasures that they cherish and revere. These treasures are not the property of anyone but gifts for everyone. In that post, I cited Greta Thunberg, the young bearer of the rights of the planet, as a gift that the West may be able to offer to the world nowadays. But also a treasure from the past, Western polyphonic music, can be seen as a gift to all humankind. Will we ever see a time when human cultures will exchange only gifts and not bombs? We are not there yet but, who knows? For the time being, the West seems to be still desperately searching for something, but nobody knows exactly what.

The Seneca Rebound: why Growth is Faster after Collapse. Explaining the European World Dominance

Lisbon: the monument to the European sailors of the age of explorations, starting with the 15th century. What made Europeans so successful in the task of conquering the world? My interpretation is that it was the result of periodic "Seneca Collapses" of the European population which made it possible to accumulate resources that would then be available to propel the European expansion. It is an effect that may be called the "Seneca Rebound" that makes growth faster after a collapse.

The Middle Ages are sometimes referred to as the "Dark Ages" -- this is mostly untrue, but it is not wrong to apply this term to the early Middle Ages, called also the "Late Antiquity"(1). According to some estimates, in 650 AD the European population had shrunk to a historical minimum of some 18 million people, about half of what it had been during the high times of the Roman Empire. If you think that today the European population is estimated to be as more than 700 million people, it is almost impossible for us to imagine the Europe of the early Middle Ages: it was a minor appendage of the Eurasian continent, a poverty-stricken place, nearly empty of people, where nothing happened except for the squabbles of local warlords fighting each other.

Yet, a few centuries later, the descendants of the inhabitants of this backward peninsula of Eurasia embarked in the attempt of conquering the world and were successful at that. By the 19th century, practically all the world was under the direct or indirect control of European countries or of their American offspring, the United States. How could it happen?

The conventional explanation for the European ruling of the world has to do with factors related to the "white man's burden", a term invented by Rudyard Kipling in 1899. According to this interpretation, the European domination was a sort of manifest destiny generated by the superior qualities -- genetic or cultural -- of the European people in terms of being smarter, more laborious, better organized, driven by their Christian faith, and the like. In comparison, the populations of the rest of world were lazy, disorganized, uncultured, and in the grip of superstitions.

Maybe, but the idea that the Europeans conquered the world because they are smarter than the others is not supported by any data. Europeans may find it flattering, but it is an ad hoc interpretation that doesn't help us understand much of what led to the European world dominance. I have been scratching my head on this question for quite a while, until I stumbled into the graph below, showing two drastic "Seneca Collapses" of the European population. The term "Seneca Collapse" indicates a situation where the decline of a complex system is faster than its growth.

Graph from William E Langer, "The Black Death" Scientific American, February 1964, p. 117 -- note how growth is faster after the collapse than it was before. This is what I call the Seneca Rebound.

Note first of all that the data are uncertain and not all authors see the population drop in the European population to have been as drastic as Langer does. But there is a general agreement that a drastic collapse of the European population took place starting in mid 14th century AD. The collapse is often attributed to the spread of the "black death," a continent-wide epidemics of plague. In reality, there were several factors that led the European population to crash down so badly, including famines and a widespread economic crisis. In a complex system it always is difficult to establish a clear-cut chain of causes and effects: when the system crashes, many factors collapse together. The population crash plague that hit Europe in mid 17th century was less drastic, but also associated with a new outburst of the plague. These two Seneca Collapses followed the one I already mentioned, when the Roman Empire collapsed during the 6th-10th centuries AD.

There is a common element of these three collapse: the remarkably rapid recovery that followed. Let's describe that in more detail.


The first collapse (from the 5th to the 8th century). After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, Europe started recovering and soon it was able to mount military attacks against neighboring regions. The first crusade started in 1095 and for some three centuries successive waves of European armies attacked the region we call today the Middle East, succeeding in creating a number of European kingdoms in the area. The result was, ultimately, a failure and the European crusades and the European Middle Eastern kingdoms withered with the mid-14th century.

The Second collapse (mid-14th century). The population crash was brutal, but as soon as Europe started recovering, a new phase of expansion started: it was the age of exploration that we may consider to have started with the discovery of the island of Madeira in 1430 and then proceeding with a remarkable burst of explorations that lasted for about a century from mid 15th century to mid 6th. This burst included Columbus' travel of 1492 and the start of the gradual expansion of Europeans in Africa and in the Americas.

The Third Collapse (mid-17th century). In this case, the collapse was not so drastic as the first two and it didn't really stop Europeans from expanding. But, with the restart of population growth, Europe saw a new phase of economic growth which ushered the age of coal and, with it, the "age of divergence" when Europe truly conquered the rest of the world and started thinking of themselves as carrying the "white man's burden."


So, there is clearly a pattern here: the expansion of the European social system didn't go on smoothly, but in bursts. Over some two millennia, the European population grew from a few tens of millions up to the current 700 million people. In the process, it underwent at least three major crashes but, every time, it restarted growing. This bumpy expansion trajectory is typical of complex systems which tend to show what I call the "Seneca Effect," cycles of slow growth and fast collapse.

Europe, intended as a social system, is a complex system and it does tend to show the Seneca behavior. It is the result of the combination of resource depletion and pollution. Before the fossil fuel age, society had two main natural resources to exploit: fertile soil and forests. Both tend to be overexploited, that is destroyed faster than they can regrow. Forests are cut faster than trees can regrow and the fertile soil is eroded and washed to the sea faster than it can reform. The decline of agriculture not only puts an end to population growth, it causes it to collapse ruinously as an effect of famines and epidemics. The loss of the revenues from forests typically weakens the state and the result is internecine wars which, of course, hasten the collapse. Both wars and epidemics can be seen as forms of pollution and the final result is what I call the Seneca Effect: a decline which is much faster than growth.

But there is life after the Seneca Collapse. The disappearance of a large fraction of the population frees some previously cultivated land for forests to regrow. Then, when the population starts re-growing, people find the new forests as a near-pristine source of wood and -- once cut -- of fertile soil, and the cycle restarts. The new cycle may grow faster than the earlier one because society still remembers the social structures and the technologies of the previous cycle. This is the "Seneca Rebound" -- growth may be faster after collapse. You can see the Seneca Rebound in the curves made by Langer for Europe. Note how growth is faster after the collapses than it was before. This is because, I think, the Europeans had kept the social and technological structures they had developed before the crash -- there was no need, for instance, to re-develop their ship-making technology (3). So, they could exploit more effectively the resources that the collapse had freed.

Then, Forests are the basic resource needed to conquer the world and the Europeans exploited them effectively. Trees provide the wood for ships and the charcoal made from wood provides the material needed to make steel for weapons. Not for nothing, it was said that England had conquered an empire with ships of wood and men of iron.

But how was it that the Europeans were so much better than others at exploiting their forests? As always, success is a question of timing, opportunities, and luck. On the opposite side of the Mediterranean, the Arab civilization was socially and technologically as sophisticated as the European one - perhaps more - but their climate didn't allow forests to grow fast enough to avoid rapid overexploitation (2). The American civilizations we call "pre-Columbian" had forests, but they hadn't yet developed the technologies of steel and of oceanic ships -- they also lacked horses for transportation and as a military weapon. The Chinese, instead, had the technologies and also the forests and, indeed, they embarked in a parallel phase of explorations.

During the 12th-13th centuries an outbreak of the same plague that had affected Europe caused a decline in the Chinese population, that was followed - possibly as a consequence - by the Mongol invasion which led to the fall of the Song dynasty. When the Chinese economy experienced its own Seneca Rebound, the age treasure voyages started in the early 1400s, during the Ming dynasty, in a period when the population had restarted growing. (4)

China population trends according to a reconstruction published by Columbia University.

But the Chinese stopped their exploration phase and retreated within their borders. So, the Europeans found no competition in their worldwide expansion and that was the origin of the history we know.

These considerations are qualitative, but I think there is something in the idea of the "Seneca Rebound" as an engine that propels civilizations forward in bursts. If this is the case, if the world's civilization goes through a new Seneca Collapse, as it is likely to happen, will it restart expanding afterward?  If we manage to avoid that the coming crash is so bad that we lose the knowledge we accumulated over several centuries and that climate change doesn't erase humankind as a species, we may well restart expanding using renewable energy -- this time into space. Why not?




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(1) If you are interested in the late antiquity period, and you can read Italian, you should read "L'Impero Globale" a recent book by Alessia Roberta Scopece who finds many parallels that age and our modern Globalization.

(2) The destruction of the Middle Eastern and North African forests may have been irreversible, as I note in this post of mine. (h/t Steve Kurtz)
 
(3) Nor there was any need to reinvent luxury and, with the rebound, Middle Ages ladies started dressing like high fashion models, as I describe in this post.




(4) Another reconstruction of the Chinese population is shown below, from an article dealing with the same question as this one -- they arrive to completely different conclusions, but it is normal.