THE TROUBLE WITH TURCHIN

THE MANAGERIAL CLASS HAS A GO AT CYCLIC HISTORY

The intellectual journey that has carried me to the point of nearing completion of a first draft of my current book arguably began with some early reflections on the work of Peter Turchin, as I pondered the events of the summer of 2020. Many of us first learned of Turchin then as some publications discussed his predictions of political and social unrest in America of the 2020s, made back in 2010. Those early reflections of mine found their way into the video series I produced which provided an initial, crude first pass at the ideas worked on in my substack over the last year and a half. I find myself though increasingly in a troubled relationship, perhaps one of creative tension, with the work and thought of Turchin. So, as I start rounding into form my own ideas, it may be valuable to reassess how I see Turchin’s vision and how it sits within my own framework.

To begin, there are obviously some significant commonalities in perspective. Not only do we both emphasize the importance of what he’d call historical cycles (I’d call them historical spirals); we both recognize that we’re currently on the cusp of a major playing out of one such spiral; and we both worry that the fallout has the potential to result in terrible human misery and suffering. We both hold out modest hope that the worst of such fallout may yet be avoided – or at least mitigated. I share his commitment to structural-dynamic analysis of historical cycles, emphasizing objective forces, and downplaying subjective factors in the process. We do, both, concede that on some occasions, at some points, subjective factors do matter, but they’re of minimal importance.

Though here it must be emphasized that “subjective” refers to self-conscious interventions. Unconscious inducements, such as evolved personality structure and related values, in a certain sense are also properly characterized as subjective. In that understanding of the term, I grant considerably more leash than does Turchin, it seems. Indeed, that difference may get at the heart of our disagreements. So, let’s turn there. For those disagreements are I think more revealing and fertile.  

Very briefly, first though, a summary of his arguments is in order. Turchin has used complex statistical methods to identify markers that allow prediction of major crises, which likely lead to civilizational, social, or state collapse. His work also examines how such entities take shape, particularly emphasizing the role of strong social in-group sentiment and loyalty, especially among such groups existing on borders of conflict. He has called such sentiment and loyalty asabiya. While I have some quibbles with some aspects of that work, too, they don’t strike me (at least at this time) as being of such great relevance as are our differences over the matter of collapse.

Again, I agree with him on the serious consequences of collapse. A few passages from his most recent book, End Times¹, unpacking the analysis of societies that have experienced the collapses predictable from his model will give some sense of those consequences:

In one-sixth of the cases, elite groups were targeted for extermination. The probability of ruler assassination was 40 percent. Bad news for the elites. Even more bad news for everybody was that 75 percent of crises ended in revolutions or civil wars (or both), and in one-fifth of cases, recurrent civil wars dragged on for a century or longer. Sixty percent of exits led to the death of the state—it was conquered by another or simply disintegrated into fragments.

some societies experienced really severe outcomes. For example, Valois France experienced nine out of twelve severe consequences during the French Wars of Religion in the sixteenth century. Kings and dukes were assassinated; elites were exterminated on a number of occasions (such as the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre); and it is estimated that three million people died from the violence, famine, or disease during this period of civil war. Other severe cases include the fall of the Tang and Song dynasties of China, the breakup of the Sassanid Empire, and the sixth-century crisis in the Eastern Roman Empire.

The full significance of these observations only becomes clear once we unpack his analytical model for making such predictions. Especially in his most recent book, Turchin strips the story to the basics of economic inequality and elite overproduction.² In some ways these two factors interact, but let’s just treat them discretely for the moment. Without really explaining why (a lacuna addressed below), Turchin sees elites at some point getting greedier and rigging the economy to benefit themselves at the expense of the rest of the society. This rigging is called the wealth pump. This tendency crashes into a tendency for elites to overproduce their own members. I’ve made this point previously, emphasizing how universities operate as managerial liberalism indoctrination camps and so the managerial class has an incentive to increase attendance at such camps.

The upshot of such processes has been the production of many more people with the credentials and disposition to believe they should be part of the ruling faction of the elite. There simply though are not so many seats at the table of the ruling elite. Consequently, such overproduced elites become disenfranchised and disillusioned about a system that has marginalized them and so are ripe to become leaders of movements against the prevailing ruling elite. And the economic inequality resulting from sudden elite greediness provides the desperate foot soldiers for such a movement against the ruling regime.

My differences with Turchin across all this are in three major areas (and some minor ones that we can put aside for today). I don’t consider them all equally important. But in juxtaposition to my own historical spirals theory, they’re all worth mentioning. Central to all of this is Turchin’s over-reliance on statistics. Any regular reader of mine knows that I’m not opposed to the use of statistic; I’ve frequently cited a wide range of scholarship which has benefited from their use — in some cases is dependent upon their use! My objection is that statistics must be an aid to knowledge, not a substitute for it. And this is where things go astray in his thinking.

Though it’s just a single illustration, I think this case points to a larger problem: Turchin gets the demographics of power wrong precisely because he fails to appreciate the insights of class analysis. His claim that most of the university professorate exercises no power is based on a failure to appreciate the social pervasiveness of power and how that is mobilized through the emergent coordination of shared class interests and values. He’s defined elite power in a way that categorically excludes the professorate – including of course himself in that exclusion. Statistical analysis does not have any inherent means of correcting for such conceptual lacunae. The danger here is that statistical analysis can provide an illusion of rigor which is lacking if the categories and definitions to which the statistic are applied are not well grounded.

What was needed for clarity on this point was a class analysis. Understanding that the professorate (even when studying shark parasites and systematics of bryophytes) is part of the same symbol manipulating class as all those others he emphasizes as being part of the ruling elite (e.g., economists, lawyers) would allow him to better appreciate how they can (unconsciously) replicate, within their students, managerial class assumptions about rationality, progress, and social engineering, even when these are only treated as meta-themes, never addressed by name.

And of course, all this results from a (still unconscious) coordination of interests and values, that bind a class in common responses to social and other related conditions. Seen through this lens, it becomes clear that the professorate plays a vital role in insuring and preserving the hegemonic power of its class – even if the overwhelming majority of them never have a seat at the table of exercised sovereign power. I don’t want to dwell on this specific point, though, particularly because as I’ve made clear on this substack, I’ve concluded that the class analysis of managerial technocracy is in itself insufficient to the needs of the moment. (As we proceed, though, it’s hard not to see Turchin’s role through that lens.)

What I’m pointing to here are theoretical blinders for which no amount of statistical analysis, however elegant and rigorous, can serve as a substitute. From my perspective, though, a more important theoretical lacuna of Turchin is his attitude to biological realism, most notably his “critique” of the selfish gene heuristic. So, let’s unpack that a little. In his book, War and Peace and War³, Turchin dedicates an extended discussion to the topic. A peculiar sleight-of-hand in his analysis is a passive trope of dissolving Dawkins’ argument into that of Machiavelli. As though suggesting that Machiavelli – whether or not Turchin’s characterization is accurate (which I know some would dispute) – was the quintessence of Dawkins’ selfish gene notion. I won’t focus on the Machiavelli angle, except insofar as Turchin sometimes uses resort to the supposed association in lieu of actual argument.  

He starts off questioning the very basis of “selfish” genes by pointing to acts of “self-sacrifice” in nature. Thankfully, it is quickly revealed that he’s only setting up a strawman, when he acknowledges how William Hamilton solved this apparent contradiction in evolutionary theory. He claims though that inclusive fitness is not sufficient to explain what Turchin identifies as the strong group feelings of in-group preference and loyalty that be calls asabiya:

Hamilton’s insight does not really help us understand human “ultrasociality”— extensive cooperation among large numbers of unrelated individuals.

Kin selection and reciprocal altruism, undoubtedly, played an important role in the early phase of the evolution of human sociality. But even “primitive” human societies, like bands of hunters and gatherers, are not composed of relatives only. There are too many nonrelatives for kin selection to explain their behavior.

This of course though is just the kind of common error to which I referred in my discussion of the biological underpinnings of Tönnies gemeinschaft analysis. Like so many commenting on the relevance of Hamilton’s work for explaining altruism in evolutionary theory, Turchin restricts himself to Hamilton’s papers of the 1960s, entirely ignoring his papers of the 70s. The Hamilton-Rushton insights expanded upon in the Tönnies commentary are plenty sufficient to explain the behavior in question. Turchin seems unfamiliar with this work, though.

Instead, he wants to substitute an untethered notion of group selection. Now, I’ve made clear repeatedly that undoubtedly group selection is an important part of human social evolution. However, it makes a big difference what one means by such a term. The theoretically sustainable understanding of this idea is to emphasize multilevel selection pressures. However, actual selective retention can only occur at the level of what Dawkins called the replicator: the genetic formula (given pleiotropy, polygenesis, and epistasis) which gave rise to the dispositions resulting in the positively selected behavior at the group level.⁴ Like so many others, though, Turchin imagines that such basic biology can be displaced by a magical incantation of “culture.”

Although the disposition to moralism or knavery might have a substantial genetic component, it is clear that temporal changes in the intensity of ethnic feeling, such as shifts in the main locus of ethnic feeling from regional to national level, and vice versa, must be culture-based.

Though, it’s not entirely clear what culture even means in this context. Behavioral results of an evolutionary selective process, at whatever level, either result in the genes replicating into future generations or the genetic foundation for the behavior is gutted. Emphasizing cultural transmission changes nothing about this. So-called culture is merely extended phenotypic effects, which are just as subject to selective pressures. Far from being some mysterious force that removes the need for biological explanation, “culture” is dependent upon biological explanation if it’s not to dissolve into magical thinking. Reaction norms still exist and still limit cultural, because limiting phenotypic, possibilities. Otherwise, we’re stuck with the incoherent notion of the infinitely plastic blank slate mind.⁵

Oddly, Turchin, apparently thinking he’s further refuting the selfish gene position, cites phenotypic diversity as manifested in the different outcomes of certain behavioral psychology experiment games across cultures.

researchers went around the world and played the ultimatum game in 15 small-scale traditional societies, which included hunter-gatherers, herders, and farmers. The amount of cross-cultural variation found in these small-scale societies was much greater than in the modernized ones (although in no society did people behave as would be predicted by the self-interest axiom). The Machiguenga of Peru made the lowest offers. Three quarters of proposals were 25 percent of the pot or less, and there was only one case of rejecting a low proposal. The Machiguenga economy is entirely focused on the household; almost no productive activity would require cooperation outside the members of the family. Same story with the Quichua of Ecuador—poorly integrated society, low offers in the ultimatum game. By contrast, the Ache of Paraguay practice widespread meat sharing and cooperation on community projects. “Aché hunters, returning home, quietly leave their kill at the edge of camp, often claiming that the hunt was fruitless; their catch is later discovered and collected by others and then meticulously shared among all in the camp.” The average proposal made by the Ache was 51 percent of the stake, almost precisely the 50:50 split predicted by fairness considerations. The Lamelara whale hunters of Indonesia go to sea in large canoes manned by a dozen or more individuals. Close cooperation is critical for a successful hunt. In the ultimatum game the Lamelara are super-fair —the average proposal was 58 percent of the stake.

This is all most interesting, though Turchin doesn’t understand why. He correctly points to the economic and environmental conditions of people who have different game outcomes. What he doesn’t seem to appreciate is that these variances are likely – whether through epigenetic or phenotypic selection – the result of reaction norm based selection pressures. (Again, see my discussion of Tönnies’ gemeinschaft analysis.) And, as I’ve demonstrated in a prior post, in my discussion of personality psychology and historical spirals, this is precisely what needs to be understood to make sense of the fundamental dynamic of those spirals.

Then to top it all off, Turchin asserts: “THE BEHAVIORAL EXPERIMENTS USING THE public goods and the ultimatum games decisively prove that Machiavelli’s self-interest premise was wrong.” Thereby, compounding his errors. The Machiavelli trope of self-interest is not a manifestation of selfish gene theory, which as Dawkins⁶, Alexander⁷, Trivers⁸, Hamilton⁹, and so many others have demonstrated, can produce keenly pro-social behavior.

The experimental evidence he cites – adjusted for Hamiltonian genetic self-interest – is entirely consistent with the biological realism of selfish gene theory. Though, of course, such pro-social outcomes are to be expected to manifest within self-identified in-groups. As Richard Alexander frequently emphasized, social cooperation is evolutionarily selected for its benefits in competition with other social groups. Some rounds of the ultimatum game between an Aché and a Lamelara whale hunter might not have resulted in quite as salutary a pro-social outcome.

I feel that Turchin’s insistence upon avoiding biological explanations winds up leaving large gaps in the explanatory power of his own story. Let’s return to this odd idea that the shift into crisis mode is a product of the greedy elites extracting excessive resources from the rest of the population – leading to economic inequality and eventually elite overproduction. For instance, in End Times, at one point he says: “after 1980, the social mood shifted away from broad-based cooperation and long-term goals toward short-term, narrowly selfish interests.”

It is an odd notion that abruptly in the 1980s – or at any other time – there should be a sudden outbreak of greediness. Was human nature really greedier at this time, or any other that saw the elites turn to the “wealth pump” behavior Turchin cites as a central marker of an era leading to the threat of crisis? Surely emphasizing greediness is simply eliding some other factor which would be needed to explain why a reliable human propensity for maximal optimization of resources would be more fully unleashed at any specific time. Referring to Turchin’s earlier work this could be explained as the erosion of asabiya. (And, yes, I realize this is a cultural explanation.) It still doesn’t answer though the question of why asabiya was intact at one moment, but then eroded in another.

As regular readers here will know, I’d say that a culture created by temporals, with high conscientiousness and low openness, is very different from one created by spatials, with the reverse personality structure. And personality structure generates values. It is the values of temporals that create a society secure and prosperous enough to sufficiently mitigate harsh Darwinian conditions to allow for the greater thriving of spatials and their values, expressed in their appetite for novelty and rule/border transgression. As a society tips from a certain critical mass of temporals to one of spatials, that’s when you’ll see an escalading erosion of asabiya.

As the rule/border-transgressing phenotype gains social influence, traditional and customary proscriptions against pursuing naked self-interest erode, and the greediness gloves start to come off. All this though – personality structures and their related values; reaction norm dynamics of phenotypic selection; and life history strategies – are the stuff of biology. Without it, Turchin is left only with vague, untethered appeals to a nebulous “culture.” Whether or not my hypothesized explanation stands up to eventual critical scrutiny, Turchin’s is an inadequately proximate one begging for a deeper ultimate explanation.   

While I wouldn’t presume to read his mind on this, given his obviously above average familiarity with the biology scholarship, I am curious why he is so resistant to biological explanations. Certainly, this vector of argument for Turchin, much like his ambitious aspiration to vindicate the professorate from accusations of participation in elite rule, has an odor of managerial class camouflage to it.

Despite recent successes at leveraging behavioral psychology (see here and here) for mass social manipulation, there is a long history within the managerial class of antipathy to any notion of a human nature which might be resistant to technocratic molding. Such limits to human malleability have been anathema to the managerial class. More appealing to their innate aptitudes and class vanity is a statistically grounded mathematical formula by which society can be bureaucratically administered through manipulation of dials for “moderating inequality” and “adjusting the level of surplus elite production.” Whatever Turchin’s motives, this is his allure for the spatials of the managerial class.

This observation provides a serendipitous segue into my third area of disagreement with Turchin. Whether it is his intention or not, this preoccupation in his approach lends itself to a technocratically oriented framing of the situation. I don’t recall him ever being fully explicit in his books about his operative assumptions regarding a solution space for addressing the crisis, which for the immediate future he now believes is inevitable – though he believes we might plan now to avoid the next one. But such a technocratic, social engineering attitude strikes me as ubiquitously “between the lines” throughout his books (at least, those that I’ve read).

Perhaps though in the less formal venue of long form podcast discussion of his work he may on occasion let down his guard – if indeed his written work is guarding against explicit expression of a commitment to managerial class values. On the Uncertain Things podcast, he explicitly refers to the potential need for government to create a “Ministry of Social Health.” Following pushback from the host, he does sheepishly walk that phrase back, saying he was being “a little tongue in cheek.”¹⁰

Readers can listen for themselves, but it sounded to me like his walk back was more about self-consciousness over the Orwellian tone of the phrase than any reconsideration of the core technocratic concept. Something like such a social engineering government body does sound like the kind of solution space implicit in his writing. And, as we’ve seen above, it’s not as though his theoretical framing of issues hasn’t in the past been peculiarly helpful to the standard invisibility ploy of managerial class rule.

The issue I’m raising here though isn’t primarily one of political alliances or commitments, but rather one of functional futility. The problem for Turchin’s project is that his bureaucratic rationality solution is itself just a replication of the problem, further intensifying the rationality crisis that has gotten us into the current mess.

Turchin’s technocratic solution requires an elite, which has been produced by gesellschaft rational authority, to bureaucratically regulate its own excesses, as though it were constrained by the very gemeinschaft traditional authority which its own bureaucratic rationality has eroded to near the point of social impotence.¹¹ The crisis of the iron cage of rationality will not be solved by more rationality. That’s just, in the immortal words of the late David Bowie, putting out fire with gasoline.

Rather, as I’ve argued on this substack, and will in my forthcoming book, only the collapse of bureaucratic rationality, under the weight of its own contradictions, opens the opportunity for a temporalist society, rooted in gemeinschaft relations and traditional authority. But, if Turchin’s technocratic solution is self-defeating, what options remain within the sphere of human agency? Long time readers here will already know my answer. And others will find out, as the forthcoming book undertakes the thankless and fraught job of attempting an answer to that question.

So, if you want to be the first on your block to have a chance to get the book, once it’s ready, please…

And if you know of anyone else who’d be interested in these topics, please…

1. Peter Turchin, End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration (New York: Penguin Press, 2023).

2. For more detailed breakdowns of his method and analyses, see: Peter Turchin, Ages of Discord: A Structural-Demographic Analysis of American History (Chaplin, Conn.: Beresta Books LLC, 2017); Peter Turchin, Historical Dynamics: Why States Rise and Fall, Reprint edition (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 2018).

3. Peter Turchin, War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires, Reprint edition (New York, N.Y: Plume, 2007).

4. For an excellent introduction to this topic, see: Steven C. Hertler, Aurelio José Figueredo, and Mateo Peñaherrera-Aguirre, Multilevel Selection: Theoretical Foundations, Historical Examples, and Empirical Evidence, 1st ed. 2020 edition (London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).

5. Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (New York: Penguin Books, 2002); Robert Kurzban, Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite: Evolution and the Modular Mind (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010).

6. Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition, 3rd edition (OUP Oxford, 2006); Richard Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene, New edition edition (Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).

7. Richard D. Alexander, Darwinism and Human Affairs (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982); Richard D. Alexander, The Biology of Moral Systems (Hawthorne, N.Y: Aldine Transaction, 1987).

8. Robert Trivers, “The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism,” The Quarterly Review of Biology 46, no. 1 (March 1, 1971): 35–57, https://doi.org/10.1086/406755.

9. W. D. Hamilton, “Selection of Selfish and Altruistic Behavior in Some Extreme Models,” Man and Beast: Comparative Social Bahavior, 1971, 57–91; W. D. Hamilton, “Innate Social Aptitudes of Man: An Approach from Evolutionary Genetics,” Biosocial Anthropology 133 (1975): 115–32.

10. Uncertain Things, “A Huge Outpouring of Human Misery (w/ Peter Turchin),” accessed July 13, 2023, https://uncertain.substack.com/p/peter-turchin-human-suffering-end-times.

11. Turchin would have us believe that the New Deal was just such a miracle. However his story gets caught on several snags. First, while he alleges that the New Deal compromise saved capitalism from a serious communist threat, as I’ve noted in my book, a communist overthrow of the US would just be a displacement of managerial class factions, hardly a civilizational collapse. Plus the New Deal was in fact a consolidation of managerial class technocracy: just delaying, while aggravating, the conditions of eventual collapse.