On Peter Turchin, Yuval Noah Harari, and Jared Diamond

I have read and listened to Yuval Noah Harari and Jared Diamond and have (after being deceived by the first impressions) become convinced that their popular historical narratives are not only inaccurate and misleading, but even dangerously so. Peter Turchin, whom I have not read, appears to belong to that same category. 

In the backdrop of the tumult around the US presidential elections, Peter Turchin has been receiving a lot of attention. Turchin is an expert in cliodynamics, which uses maths to model historical change. See this and this. 

At least an important part of the appeal of the grand narratives (or megahistories) of Turchin, like of Yuval Harari and Jared Diamond, comes from the logic and simplicity (or accessibility) of their narratives and findings. And this while maintaining the appearance of rigour and a comprehensive global historical sweep spanning millions of years. Besides, their messages are resonant with the times. And this has been especially so with respect to Turchin. 

Like Diamond, Turchin has limited academic/scholarly background of history. Harari, influenced by Diamond, too has limited global historical scholarship beyond medieval Europe. In keeping with his original background Diamond bases his historical analysis almost completely on environmental differences. Turchin's positive and progressing evolutionary approach too draws from his own main training as an ecologist. 

Perhaps like a thermodynamics researcher applying the same tools to model financial markets and claiming a whole new body of thermo-finance? 

Ian Parker in The New Yorker has a brilliant takedown of Harari's "history of everyone, ever". 

Harari’s account, though broadly chronological, is built out of assured generalization and comparison rather than dense historical detail. “Sapiens” feels like a study-guide summary of an immense, unwritten text—or, less congenially, like a ride on a tour bus that never stops for a poke around the ruins. (“As in Rome, so also in ancient China: most generals and philosophers did not think it their duty to develop new weapons.”) Harari did not invent Big History, but he updated it with hints of self-help and futurology, as well as a high-altitude, almost nihilistic composure about human suffering. He attached the time frame of aeons to the time frame of punditry—of now, and soon. His narrative of flux, of revolution after revolution, ended urgently, and perhaps conveniently, with a cliffhanger. “Sapiens,” while acknowledging that “history teaches us that what seems to be just around the corner may never materialise,” suggests that our species is on the verge of a radical redesign. Thanks to advances in computing, cyborg engineering, and biological engineering, “we may be fast approaching a new singularity, when all the concepts that give meaning to our world—me, you, men, women, love and hate—will become irrelevant.”

Talking with the Isreali President Reuven Rivlin at a summit in Tel Aviv in September 2019, Harari made this claim,

In two hundred years, I can pretty much assure you that there will not be any more Israelis, and no Homo sapiens—there will be something else.

The confidence on this prediction, for someone who calls himself a historian, is stunning. The article has so many insights which point to the potential motivations of Harari. It also points to the very limited base of Harari's historical scholarship (research, collaborations, field work, PhD advising, seminars/workshops, etc) outside of European military history of 16th century. His historical knowledge appears almost completely to have been accumulated through reading and listening to other's works over a period of less than 10 years. To this extent, it is hard to describe him as more than a writer of popular history. But he's mighty impressive at that. 

After all, to be considered an expert in historical analysis, the least one would expect would be deep academic or practicing scholarship in the particular field and not mere accumulation of second-hand knowledge from books and other sources. It's here that the claims of historical scholarship of all the three struggles to pass muster.

Harari's digital futurology of human beings should be merely seen alongside the several other such prophecies, for there is nothing which stands out in method or techniques that distinguishes it and thereby makes it merit serious consideration.

The emergence of Turchin is in keeping with the trend of our times which worships mathematical models, to the exclusion of all else. As a thought experiment if one tries to just identify, categorise and grade historical events over even a couple of centuries (forget millennia), you'll realise how much will always be left out in any modelling exercise. Besides, the wide latitude also makes it perfect to fit in whatever hypothesis you have.

The main reason for Turchin's prominence appears to be that he's got lucky with his prediction. Underlining the point, sample this,

Turchin’s prognostications would be easier to dismiss as barstool theorizing if the disintegration were not happening now, roughly as the Seer of Storrs foretold 10 years ago. If the next 10 years are as seismic as he says they will be, his insights will have to be accounted for by historians and social scientists—assuming, of course, that there are still universities left to employ such people.

In 2008 Turchin published this exhortation on cliodynamics,

What caused the collapse of the Roman Empire? More than 200 explanations have been proposed, but there is no consensus about which explanations are plausible and which should be rejected. This situation is as risible as if, in physics, phlogiston theory and thermodynamics coexisted on equal terms. This state of affairs is holding us back. We invest in medical science to preserve the health of our bodies, and in environmental science to maintain the health of ecosystems. Yet our understanding of what makes societies healthy is in the pre-scientific stage. Sociology that focuses on the past few years or decades is important. In addition, we need a historical social science, because processes that operate over long timescales can affect the health of societies. It is time for history to become an analytical, and even a predictive, science... We must collect quantitative data, construct general explanations and test them empirically on all the data, rather than on instances carefully selected to prove our pet narratives. To truly learn from history, we must transform it into a science.

Amanda Rees has an excellent essay where she highlights the problems with the use of statistical techniques in historical analysis, 

For the majority of historians, ‘historical facts’ are not discrete items that exist independently, awaiting scholars who will hunt them down, gather them up and catalogue them safely. They need to be created and interpreted. Textual archives might seem relatively easy to reproduce, for example, but, just as with archaeological digs, the physical context in which documents are found is essential to their interpretation: what groups, or items, or experiences did past generations value and record, and which of these must be salvaged from the margins of the archives? What do the marginalia tell us about how the meanings of words have changed?... The significance of context and interpretation becomes more vital still in moving beyond the text to the material culture of the past. Scholars working on agricultural history – an essential element in the environmentally oriented narratives of Harari and Diamond – have to figure out from context and through an act of interpretative imagination how landscapes were appraised, how tools were used, who used them, and who profited from them. Or indeed, to ask, on whom the tools were used. The historical record is inevitably limited, since the experiences of some groups are much easier to access than the experiences of others...

It is for this reason, among others, that a positivist language of science – of testing hypotheses against data – sits uncomfortably with the practice of history. Cliometricians treat history as a laboratory containing many successions of datasets against which different economic theories could be tested. But ever since Leopold von Ranke – the 19th-century German scholar who founded professional history – historiographical practice has paid close attention to and critically interrogated the sources used by historians, displaying an abiding awareness of the significance of the differential distribution of social, economic, political and technological power when it comes to their creation. To paraphrase Émile Durkheim, you really shouldn’t treat historical facts as things.

Rees has a neat description of Turchin's assumptions and techniques. Turchin essentially lays all his modelling around two recurring patterns. The first, secular sociodemographic cycle, revolves around centuries long cyclical increases in population size and increasing resource constraints leading to sociopolitical instability and declines in population. The second was a shorter 50-year father-son cycle which nested within the first long cycle and where experience of war by one generation leads to its rejection by the next, and re-acceptance by the third, and so on. 

With regard to Turchin's central argument about elite competition engendering social instability, there is a long history of work on these lines. All of them have been more than ecologists and mathematical modellers. And none earlier have been cavalier enough make claims about definitive enough patterns for large complex systems. Besides, Turchin's conception of elite struggle appears narrowly defined as one confined to that within a larger elite group and not elites representing the emerging social group. 

Turchin also appears to come out as being very loose with facts, including making up his data points. See this for one which jumps straight out if you start to google. 

Update 1 (01.01.2022)

Ian Hesketh has a cautionary essay on the Big History narratives.