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Preppers Get Ready–Real Mayan Prophecy: University Professor Predicts Massive Increase in Violence Until 2020
EDITOR NOTE: Dr. Turchin explains the cyclical nature of violence. We are in the middle of a 60 year cycle of rising violence which will peak in 2020. Preppers–get ready.
A Feature Article in Nature on Cliodynamics
posted on August 3, 2012 by Peter Turchin
Today’s issue of Nature has a Feature Article by Laura Spinney on cliodynamics. Laura interviewed me when we both attended the Frankfurt Forum on Cultural Evolution (about which I wrote in an earlier blog). I think she did a great job capturing the excitement of our new fledgling discipline and explaining in easy-to-understand language some of the fairly complex concepts and results from cliodynamic studies.
In this blog I’d like to amplify on a couple of points raised in the Nature article. Also, if there are any comments or questions about any aspects of this research, I’d like to hear them.
The graph in the Nature Feature is based on my paper that just came out in the Journal of Peace Research (see my blog two days ago).Here’s a different angle on the same results:
This graph shows the total number of political violence events per five years, as well as numbers of three major types of violence. These types are classified as clashes between groups of people (‘riots’), violence by groups against individuals (‘lynchings’), and violence by individuals against groups (‘terrorism’). The last category, for reasons explained in the article, includes rampage shootings. Note that this graph focuses on the numbers of events, but the JPR article also shows and discusses other views, e.g. the number of people killed in political violence events per one million of population.
As Laura explains, the dynamical pattern is complex, because it has two oscillations: the long-term secular cycle and a shorter 50-year cycle on top of the secular trends. She, understandably, devotes much time to the discussion of the 50-year cycle, because it is a striking feature of these data. However, I personally find the secular cycles much more worthy of attention. Partly it is because I don’t fully understand the mechanisms underlying the 50-year cycles, and partly because, unlike secular cycles, they are not a universal feature of instability dynamics in all societies. As is discussed in my books Historical Dynamics and War and Peace and War, 50-year cycles don’t show up in the Chinese data (and there I also explain why).
On the other hand, longer secular cycles are apparently a universal feature of all complex, state-level societies (at least, they crop up in every large-scale agrarian society for which we have reasonably detailed data on political violence). As I wrote in my previous blog, the chief motivation for the American project was to find out if these cycles continue to operate in post-agrarian modern societies.
I think that the nice progression (going backwards) of 1970, 1920, and 1870 spikes is partly due to ‘luck,’ because in historical data the periodicity is not quite as clean-cut, and periods between successive spikes can vary between 40 and 60 years. Note also that there is a missing peak of 1820, although the previous one, the American Revolutionary War of 1776-83 took place pretty much on schedule (American Revolution falls outside of the time frame of the JPR paper, but we know from the work of Paul Gilje that there was a build up to it in the preceding decade or so – as in the pre-Civil War period the rising frequency of political violence events singaled an impending crisis). The reason why there was no violence spike in 1820 is probably because in this period all structural-demographic conditions were so favorable that they suppressed any interest in making trouble on everybody’s part (this is discussed in the book that I am working on right now). READMOREHERE
