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发帖数: 481 | 1 Will the US Really Experience a Violent Upheaval in 2020?
By Natalie Wolchover | LiveScience.com
Circa 1870, the North fought the South in the Civil War. Half a century
later, around 1920, worker unrest, racial tensions and anti-Communist
sentiment caused another nationwide upsurge of violence. Then, 50 years
later, the Vietnam War and Civil Rights Movement triggered a third peak in
violent political, social and racial conflict. Fifty years after that will
be 2020. If history continues to repeat itself, we can expect a violent
upheaval in the United States in a few years.
It sounds like pseudoscience, but it's a published theory. "My model
suggests that the next [peak in violence] will be worse than the one in 1970
because demographic variables such as wages, standards of living and a
number of measures of intra-elite confrontation are all much worse this time
," said Peter Turchin, an ecologist, evolutionary biologist and
mathematician at the University of Connecticut.
Turchin has led the development of a field of study called "cliodynamics,"
in which scientists attempt to find meaningful patterns in history. The
endeavor flies in the face of the traditional study of history, which
assumes the countless variables interacting within a society lead to chaotic
fluctuations in outcomes like violence and social unrest. Massimo Pigliucci
, a philosopher of science at CUNY-Lehman College, said most historians
believe that "the factors at play are so many and so variable that there is
little reason to expect quasi-regular cycles, or a unified theory to explain
them."
But Turchin argues there is order in the chaos after all.
In the new study, Turchin, who reported his results in the July issue of the
Journal of Peace Research, compiled historical data about violent incidents
in U.S. history between 1780 and 2010, including riots, terrorism,
assassinations and rampages. The data indicates that a cycle of violence
repeats itself every 50 years in America, like a wave that peaks in every
other generation. This short-term cycle is superimposed over another, longer
-term oscillation that repeats every 200 to 300 years. The slower waves in
violence can either augment or suppress the 50-year peaks, depending on how
the two cycles overlap.
The longer cycle is "the one which we understand much better, and it is a
universal feature of all complex societies," Turchin told Life's Little
Mysteries. From the Roman Empire to medieval France to ancient China,
scholars have noted that societies swing between 100-150 years of relative
peace and 100-150 years of conflict, and then back again. Only some
societies exhibit the shorter-term, and less subtle, 50-year-long cycles of
violence along the way — the Roman Empire, for one, and if Turchin's theory
is correct, the United States as well.
Why 50-year cycles? Turchin explained that a surge of violence begins in the
same way as a forest fire: explosively. After a period of escalation
followed by sustained violence, citizens begin to "yearn for the return of
stability and an end to fighting," he wrote in his paper. The prevailing
social mood swings toward stifling the violence at all costs, and those who
directly experienced the civil violence maintain the peace for about a human
generation — 20 or 30 years. But the stability doesn't last.
Eventually, "the conflict-scarred generation dies off or retires, and a new
cohort arises, people who did not experience the horrors of civil war and
are not immunized against it. If the long-term social forces that brought
about the first outbreak of internal hostilities are still operating, then
the society will slide into the second civil war," he wrote. "As a result,
periods of intense conflict tend to recur with a period of roughly two
generations (40–60 years)."
Peaks occurred around 1870, 1920 and 1970. Confounding this pattern, there
was no peak of U.S. violence in the 1820s. In fact, historians call it the "
era of good feelings." Turchin explained that social variables such as wages
and employment were "really excellent at that time, so there was no reason
for any violence to get going." The cycle was skipped.
But we might not be so lucky this time around. If Turchin's model is right,
then the current polarization and inequality in American society will come
to a head in 2020. "After the last eight years or so, notice how the
discourse in our political class has become fragmented. It's really
unprecedented for the last 100 years. So basically by all measures, there
are social pressures for instability that are much worse than 50 years ago."
Pigliucci, who writes a well-known blog on pseudoscience and skeptical
thinking, says that although he believes Turchin is "moving in the right
direction" by applying mathematical models to history, in this case he might
be seeing patterns in random data. Violence and other forms of social
unrest undoubtedly vary over time within any give society, Pigliucci said,
but most historians would say these fluctuations are random.
Pigliucci isn't convinced that the 50-year cycle of violence Turchin has
identified in U.S. history reflects more than just a random fluctuation. "
The database is too short: the entire study covers the period 1780-2010, a
mere 230 years," Pigliucci wrote in an email. "You can fit at most four 50-
year peaks and two secular ones. I just don't see how one could reasonably
exclude that the observed pattern is random. But of course we would have to
wait a lot longer to collect new data and find out."
Only time will tell if the cycle of U.S. violence holds true, and another
telltale peak — or lack thereof — is only a few years away. |
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