To what extent does history repeat itself? Is history "circular"?

Are we living in a "unique age" with "unprecedented" challenges?

It's time to break open these nice little packaged sayings by surveying an interesting (new-ish) field of historical research, and its critics--cliodynamics.

What is this new field studying patterns in history?

Recurring patterns in history have been a focus of research for the emerging field of cliodynamics, a field pioneered by the historian, biologist and social scientist Peter Turchin.

The title comes from Clio, the muse of history, and dynamics, "the study of temporally varying processes and the search for causal mechanisms."

Cliodynamics is inter-disciplinary, bringing together economics, social science, statistical mechanics and history. It has, for example, examined how trends in areas such as wage growth/decline, political cohesion/polarisation, food supply etc could lead to cycles of war, peace and other outcomes, drawing on an enormous database called "Seshat."

I say "could", for we do not want to mistake correlation with causation.

Image from peterturchin.com

How it works: income inequality and how peace leads to war?

As a brief example, in one of Turchin's main works War and Peace and War, he shows how there are cycles of war and peace, brought about by variations in income and a sense of shared unity within nations.

The title is taken from a quote by George Puttenham in 1589:

"Peace makes plenty, plenty makes pride, pride breeds quarrel, quarrel breeds war. War brings spoil, and spoil brings poverty, poverty patience, and patience peace. So peace brings war and war brings peace."

The spoils of war (or innovation and technological growth I'd add) are not spread evenly. Even though a society on the whole may grow more prosperous, there are still only so many "elite" positions in society. Discontent can breed among the middle and lower classes as income inequality becomes exaggerated. This can be one of the causes of revolution, civilisational decline, or social reform.

Of course, this does not happen exactly uniformly in every society, but there are a remarkable number of cases where this carries some weight in the civilisations Turchin analyses, among them the Russian Empire, Rome and the United States. I thoroughly recommend the thought-provoking read.

Critics of cliodynamics

Cliodynamics has its critics, perhaps unfairly, perhaps not. One ABC Future Tense podcast was critical of cliodynamics, saying that it is "in vogue" with international commentators and that it is "the idea that history is circular." They critique the idea of over-emphasising numbers and trends, at the cost of understanding individual human stories. From my correspondence with David Christian, the founder of the field of "Big History", this is also a concern.

We underestimate the impact of powerful individuals' choices to shape history, therefore, no two eras are the same. I concur that we shouldn't underestimate the influence of individuals, but is this a fair characterisation of cliodynamics?

Response to criticism

To say that history is circular is an oversimplification of the discipline. Cliodynamics does not claim to be able to predict the future with a high degree of certainty, or to identify uniform patterns across society, but rather similar patterns.

The field aims to test and falsify hypotheses about the variables that lead to civilisational collapse so that we can build more resilient societies today, variables such as food production, population, etc.

Turchin goes to great pains on his blog Cliodynamica to show that cliodynamics is not a replacement for traditional historical study that can focus on the perspectives of individuals, but rather a complementary tool in the search for knowledge about the past. See "Arise Cliodynamics" for an overview of his position.

Why history is not circular, and why today is different

I think all parties can agree that using the past as a guide to the future can be problematic, as our current situations, despite some similarity, are far from identical with the past.

Here are three reasons why today is different from the past:

The possibility of universal basic income and automation could drastically affect the tensions brought about by wage inequality and unemployment in earlier societies.
Today we have many increasingly complex societies, whereas in the past we've also had simpler societies
We have, for the first time in history, a hyper-interconnected, global "civilisation", so some variables that used to affect a limited number of civilisations, like population and resource production, are now a global concern.

Some patterns will recur, as the axioms of civilisation remain: we are human beings, bound by a quest for survival and social interaction in environments with finite resources. On large scales, this will produce certain types of co-operation and conflict. It's certainly an interesting and important time to look after the health of our communities locally, nationally and globally.

How true is it that history "repeats itself", even in the "unique" 21st century?

To what extent does history repeat itself? Is history "circular"? Are we living in a "uni

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