The escalating ratchet of progress and human history
on how progress increases the stakes of the game and the consequences of collapse
In an earlier essay, I argued that “the succession of breakthroughs that define human history and long-run progress constitute a ratchet, where every breakthrough increases the stakes of collapse”. As Brian Fagan put it, “the whole process of civilisation may be seen as a process of trading up on the scale of vulnerability”1.
Often, this ratcheting up of the risks results in what Ronald Wright has called a ‘progress trap’2:
Progress has an internal logic that can lead beyond reason to catastrophe. A seductive trail of successes may end in a trap.
The first such trap was the perfection of hunting. As Wright noted,
Palaeolithic hunters who learnt how to kill two mammoths instead of one had made progress. Those who learnt how to kill 200 — by driving a whole herd over a cliff — had made too much. They lived high for a while, then starved….
The perfection of hunting spelled the end of hunting as a way of life.
But equally often, our species manages to avoid collapse by finding a novel solution. As Ian Morris puts it,
Success creates new problems; solving them creates still newer problems. Life, as they say, is a vale of tears….
Often people fail to rise to its challenges, and social development stagnates or even declines. At other times, though, sloth, fear, and greed combine to push some people to take risks, innovating to change the rules of the game. If at least a few of them succeed and if most people then adopt the successful innovations, a society might push through the resource bottleneck and social development will keep rising.
But all solutions carry an unavoidable cost - the cost of failure and the stakes of the game that is human civilisation go up with each such solution.
The escalating ratchet of agriculture
The most obvious example of this raising of the stakes that progress brings is the Neolithic Revolution and the transition from hunting and gathering to settled agriculture. Mesopotamian agriculture depended upon the labour-intensive and costly maintenance of an elaborate system of canals to irrigate the crops, a feat of control that directly caused increased soil salinity and eventually made irrigated agriculture impossible in that environment3.
But the failure of individual civilisations due to soil salinity does not mean that irrigated agriculture is a failure. In fact, modern agriculture is simply the same strategy applied with more energy and even greater manipulation of the environment thanks to the mix of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, modern machinery and irrigation.
The escalating ratchet of disease
Every significant ‘energy revolution’ in human history has also carried with it a significant disease burden. Agricultural intensification goes hand-in-hand with an increased burden of zoonotic diseases. Cultivation also “leads to concentrated populations, and concentrated populations have higher burdens of parasites”4. Increased interconnectivity in the middle ages led to the destruction of the Plague and modern connectivity makes pandemics like Covid possible.
As Kyle Harper puts it5:
Modernity is not a one-way street to human supremacy over nature, but a kind of escalating ratchet, in which humans have gained a remarkable but unstable advantage over an ever-growing number of parasites.
The escalating ratchet of capitalism and money
It can also be argued (as Sri Thiruvadanthai has) that the entire history of capitalism is simply an increasingly effective stabilisation of the system. This strategy also comes at a cost, which is that the consequences of failure and system collapse continuously ratchet up.
Even a longer history of money and credit follows a similar path with a ratcheting up of the stakes and occasional collapses into prior forms. First only metal could serve as money with strangers (e.g. classical Greece), then metal as money with the potential for debasement as a temporary strategy to ease fiscal pressures (Roman debasement of their currency), then paper money linked to metal (Tang and Song dynasty China), then government debt with a credible commitment to repay the debt and a central bank that repo-ed this debt to provide currency (The English Financial Revolution and the Bank of England), then elastic private bank credit still constrained by demand for metal in crises, then Bretton Woods, and now finally pure paper currency with maximum elasticity for reserve currencies.
The law of the conservation of catastrophe
Fragility and tail risk have been a part of human existence since the very origin of our species. They are inseparable from the very idea of civilisation and human control of our environment.
In fact, everything that can be described as progress in human history involves shifting risk to the tail and modernity simply accelerates this dynamic. As William H. McNeill put it in an excellent essay titled ‘Control and Catastrophe in Human Affairs’,
the more perfect any particular patch of ordered activity may be, the more it alters older equilibria and the greater the resulting fragility…
risk of catastrophe is the underside of the human condition—a price we pay for being able to alter natural balances and to transform the face of the earth through collective effort and the use of tools…
Human history thus becomes an extraordinary, dynamic equilibrium in which triumph and disaster recur perpetually on an ever-increasing scale as our skills and knowledge grow.
McNeill called this the law of ‘the conservation of catastrophe’ where “every gain in precision in the coordination of human activity and every heightening of efficiency in production were matched by a new vulnerability to breakdown”.
Human progress is fragile and impermanent and exposes us to greater risks with each step. But collapse is not inevitable and can be delayed, maybe even permanently. Either way, turning back the clock is not an option. As Ronald Wright puts it,
For all its cruelties, civilization is precious, an experiment worth continuing. It is also precarious: as we climbed the ladder of progress, we kicked out the rungs below. There is no going back without catastrophe. Those who don’t like civilization, and can’t wait for it to fall on its arrogant face, should keep in mind that there is no other way to support humanity in anything like our present numbers or estate.
Brian Fagan in ‘The Long Summer’
Ronald Wright in ‘A Short History of Progress’
'Salt and Silt in Mesopotamian Agriculture’ by Jacobsen and Adams
Nathan Wolfe in ‘The Viral Storm’
Harper, Kyle. Plagues upon the Earth (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World) (pp. 8-9). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.