The latest issue of Foreign Affairs includes an article by Niall Ferguson called ‘Complexity and Collapse: Empires on the Edge of Chaos.’ Read it yourself, but the substance of the piece is that we should not think about the rise and fall of imperial systems in terms of traditional seasonal or cyclical narratives (which to Ferguson means Vico, Hegel, Marx, Spengler, Toynbee, Kennedy and Jared Diamond), since empires, like all other social organizations, are complex adaptive systems subject to arrythmic changes. In normal person English, this means that the collapse of an imperial power like the modern United States can happen in a matter of months and years, not centuries.
The piece marks a continuing enthusiasm on the part of Ferguson, dating back at least to his Virtual History book, for thinking about history in the context of complexity theory, something I endorse – but with increasing caution as time wears on. There’s no doubt in my mind that societies are complex systems; this is self-evident. Ferguson’s warning about the potential speed with which one can collapse is also well taken. The problem is with how we go about taking the scientific model and applying it to the human world; and here I believe we should be much more cautious than Ferguson is being.
The question first arises when you ask yourself what, exactly, is different about Ferguson’s argument by being articulated in the language of complexity theory. Ferguson suggests that complexity theory should alter the way we understand causation: that the 9/11 attacks were not anything to do with Sayyid Qutb and the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood, only the politics of Saudi Arabia in the 1990s; that World War One “was actually caused by a series of diplomatic miscalculations in the summer of 1914”, not deep shifts in the nineteenth century imperial system. Proximate events, not deep social transformations, are the source of dramatic change.
But existing narratives account for this story quite adequately, if told right. Despite Ferguson’s attempt to suggest that all historians apart from him are trapped within fallacious narratives arcs, I don’t think many would reject the claim that change can come about suddenly and unexpectedly. Ferguson’s essential warning in this piece – that the US needs to be thinking about the risk of a sudden and dramatic shift in global power relations – seems to require no special theories to be plausible. (Surely at least Mr. Marx, with his rather peculiar enthusiasm for revolutions, can't really be said to be uninterested in dramatic shifts in equilibria?)
In the language of complexity, the stable state is a product of dynamic equilibrium, then an amplifier effect produces a dramatic phase shift. In the language of history, the old regime dominates the world yet rests on fragile foundations, so that a small spark produces a cataclysmic collapse. The story is exactly the same; only the language has changed.
This is a sleight of hand which gives the complexity metaphor greater impact than it actually offers, and causes Ferguson to dismiss deep causes entirely since they are only manifested through short term catalytic events. To reduce the argument ad absurdum, the massive discrepancy between income and house prices was nothing to do with the collapse of the stock market bubble; only one random person’s decision to default on a loan in Utah explained the financial crisis.
This can be seen most clearly when Ferguson goes on to talk about the example of imperial collapse more directly: “most imperial falls are associated with fiscal crises,” he notes, “sharp imbalances between revenues and expenditures, as well as difficulties with financing public debt.” Well, where do these come from, if not deeper causes such as changing demographics and ideologies, leading to differential consumption and production habits in the society under examination? However much of the current debt has appeared due to the declining revenues and rising costs of deficit economics in the last year and a half, you still can’t explain the situation without reference to the deterioration of Western manufacturing and the growth of a credit-consumption economy, neither of which make sense as short-term cataclysmic stories. These may be latent, or sub-surface phenomena – things that are causing the system to rot from within yet with no apparent problems from without – but they’re still vital components of understanding why the dramatic shift takes place when it does.
It turns out, then, that the story is more or less the same as one that historians could tell you without the language of complexity theory. An apparently prosperous society might be masking deep fragilities, and that these might appear suddenly, apparently overnight even, when a particular contingent event catalyses a dramatic change. Not just an old-fashioned historian, even an early modern scholar steeped in the language of Biblical providentialism would be as equipped to make this observation as any modern complexity theorist.
The question thus remains: what does viewing the world in terms of complexity theory actually change?
The first possible response might be called “vulgar complexity theory.” This draws an equation between complex systems and chaotic or unstable behaviour. In fact, only some complex systems are unstable, and many may exhibit long periods of stability before a dramatic phase shifts. Some have dramatic shifts that come at entirely unpredictable moments. Others may even demonstrate extended periods of chaotic behaviour before stabilising entirely. Certainly, then, employing complexity theory doesn’t mean we should be any more pessimistic and hand’s off than we already are; or be any more optimistic and hand’s on, for that matter. It doesn’t actually change at all our normative beliefs about the future path of the world.
The second, related response is the one that Ferguson ventures toward at the end of his piece: that understanding empire as a complex system allows us to manage it more intelligently. “The attempt is worthwhile,” Ferguson writes, “because an understanding of how complex systems function is an essential part of any strategy to anticipate and delay their failure.” Fair enough, up to a point. But the problem with this is not so different to that faced by the vulgar complexity theorist. It presumes that, by recognizing a complex system as a complex system, we are somehow better able to stop it behaving like a complex system.
The problem with this is that we as actors are inescapably constituent parts of the thing we are examining. We are trapped in a feedback loop where our analysis of the world adjusts and alters the nature of the world, since it causes us to behave differently. Indeed, this is one of the main things that makes human society a complex system in the first place. The pessimism resulting from the crash of 2009 is no less a part of the overall phenomenon of market behaviour than was the excessive optimism of the Bush years. The human fallacy is to take ourselves out of the system and assume that we’re somehow watching things from the moon. In this sense, an old providentialist might actually be in a better position than we are, since at least he is fuelled by a belief that the ways of God cannot be understood, and so his ignorance is not multiplied by hubris.
We logically cannot hope to manage a complex non-linear system on these terms unless the system does not behave in an complex, non-linear way.
The validity of using complexity theory to explain changes in history in the way Ferguson is doing, then, has real limits. Understood correctly, complexity theory offers little way of accurately understanding and predicting, and therefore of mitigating, potential catastrophic change. In fact, deploying it this way often turns out to be just another clever method of masking one’s prejudices. For instance, Ferguson suggests that a deficit crisis could produce a rapid collapse of American power. The logical concomitant of this is that the US should be substantially more financially conservative than it is: batten down the hatches in expectation of the tsunami, fear what Nassim Taleb calls the ‘Black Swan.’ Massive cuts ahoy, it seems.
But might not a sudden and dramatic attempt by leaders to cut back state spending and increase revenues be exactly the kind of process that accelerates the collapse? After all, it was Gorbachev’s attempts to balance the budget in the Soviet Union that produced the fire sale deal on arms reduction with Reagan, which in turn led to the challenge and collapse of Soviet power throughout Eastern Europe.
We are inescapably participants in the system as well as analysts of it. This is why we can’t think about human society in the same way we might think about, say, forest fires. Being substantially more conservative and anticipating the black swan effect for a forest fire carries minimal risks and comparatively small costs, but it offers a major security advantage if the unpredicted event takes place. Human society does not work in the same way, since conservatism is not just a response to the system, it also forms part of the system.
Of course, I should add that this doesn’t suggest that an activist policy is any more or less misguided. The point is not to replace one prejudice with another. Taken to its extreme, it’s hard not to see the moral of complexity as being that there’s nothing we can do to anticipate unpredictable events. After all, the clue is in the name.
There is, though, a third way of thinking about society in terms of complexity theory, a way that offers less to a social scientist looking for policy prescriptions, but is in my view both more persuasive and more hopeful. The key here is not to think about complex systems just in terms of chaotic shifts in equilibrium, Ferguson’s principal metaphorical adoption, but also in terms of emergent behaviour: systems where astonishing, unpredicted solutions to problems emerge in unexpected ways, and demonstrate a power and impact far beyond what any single individual could achieve by trying to think through the system as a whole.
Focusing on emergent behaviour rather than the dynamics of the system suggests that our failure to understand perfectly how the system works may not necessarily be a problem. Maybe our attempts to manage the crisis will work. Maybe a solution will come in a completely unexpected way. It’s not, as Ferguson says, that “an understanding of how complex systems function is an essential part of any strategy to anticipate and delay their failure.” Instead, an understanding of complex systems simply allows us to be hopeful: to believe that, if we all try our best to act in a way that makes sense to us, something may emerge from somewhere to dramatically solve existential problems facing us; offering a vision that we all form part of a greater unit with a logic not so much beyond us as expressed through us.
While this offers no clear route to the future, no roadmap for where we as societies should go, at the very least it holds open the possibility that we can get there if we keep trying.
Think Of the Children
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