A Clockwork Toynbee

How long is a business cycle? It varies. But I hear tell, on average 5½ years.

How long is the Kondratieff wave? It varies, but "about 40 to 60 years" according to Google.

How long does a civilization last? "340 years," Google reports boldly. That's not what I was thinking. I tried one of the search results, from Larry Freeman at owlcation:

Recently, I was talking with a colleague at work and I mentioned that civilizations usually only last 500 years. The only problem was that I couldn't remember where I had heard that. In fact, I wasn't all that sure that I was right. I know that the Roman Empire lasted roughly 500 years but how about the Egyptians, the Chinese, the Ottomons, etc...

Yeah, no, without looking I'll say the Roman empire lasted near 500 years. The Roman civilization lasted much longer. The Roman empire was the "universal state" phase of the Roman civilization. Just a phase. If I remember right.

To be fair, the title of Freeman's post mentions "the empires of ancient civilizations" and so does the text of the link address. But let's not confuse empires with civilizations.

One more search result: Luke Kemp's The lifespans of ancient civilisations at BBC Future. According to his graphic, "The average lifespan of a civilisation is 336 years". Maybe they're short like that if you spell it with an "s"...?

"In the graphic," Kemp writes, 

I have compared the lifespan of various civilisations, which I define as a society with agriculture, multiple cities, military dominance in its geographical region and a continuous political structure.

There it is. I bolded it: "a continuous political structure". In other words, Kemp sees the Roman Monarchy, the Roman Republic, and the Roman Empire as three separate civilizations. Good grief.

Hey, figure it however you want. But don't ignore Arnold J Toynbee who said, as I remember it, that civilizations rise out of a Dark Age, and fall into the next Dark Age. Doing it Toynbee's way you can get civilizations lasting 2000 years. That's a big difference from 336 or 340.

Monarchy, republic, and empire are different stages in the government of civilization. Plato said something like that too, I hear:

From The Lessons of History by Will and Ariel Durant

 
I read something one time where the General asked for a long-term weather forecast so that he could plan his military strategy. The weather people told the General that a long term forecast would be too unreliable to be useful. The General acknowledged this, but said "I need it anyway, to plan my strategy." Sorry, can't remember where that story comes from.

Stephen Blaha has studied Toynbee's Study enough to be able to develop a sort of mathematical approximation of the pattern of civilization described by Toynbee.

I'm not totally comfortable with the idea of setting Toynbee to music like that (though others -- Peter Turchin comes to mind -- similarly set civilization to music). But I figured Blaha's summaries of Toynbee's descriptions should be quite excellent. So here we are, at the Google Books version of Blaha's The Life Cycle of Civilizations, which includes links to the text of several chapters.

I took the link to Chapter 8: General Considerations on the Theory of Civilizations, where under the subheading "The Length of a Cycle" we read:

Our initial selection of 267 years as the approximate period of oscillation was based on Toynbee's observations that the time of troubles of a civilization was roughly 400 years as was the time interval of the universal state that typically followed a time of troubles. Toynbee also pointed out that in this 800 year time interval there were oscillations normally amounting to three and a half beats. The time of troubles was not entirely a downward move. It usually had a rally within it. The universal state was most often not just a rally. It often had a rout within it. Consequently Toynbee's basic picture of a time of troubles was rout-rally-rout, and of a universal state as rally-rout-rally...

Just one stage of civilization as described by Toynbee, the Time of Troubles, lasts longer than the 336 to 340 years that I find on the internet. So does the stage that comes next, the Universal State. So does the Dark Age that follows the Universal State, I want to say; but now we're treading on the thin ice of my memory.

I have no use for definitions that treat the different governments of a people as different civilizations. It's like killing an animal so you can study it.

It's like taking our unsustainably massive public and private debt, breaking it up into a bunch of small pieces -- household debt, nonfinancial business debt, financial business debt, the federal debt, and state and local government debt -- and saying "Where's the problem?"

Everywhere, apparently.

 

I use the numbers, Blaha's and Toynbee's both, as examples that allow me to think through the pattern of civilization, somewhat like the General's use of a long-term weather forecast.