At Our Wits' End, page 23
An example of this can be seen in the Black Death in Europe. By the late 1340s, the European population had become unsustainably high, leading to famine and so it became a weakened population. When the plague hit, therefore, it was unleashed on people who already suffered from weakened immunity. This made it far more catastrophic than other outbreaks of plague and it killed around a third of the European population. However, it wouldn’t have been a random third. It disproportionately impacted the poor. In some areas of England, up to 80% of the labouring class was killed.[28] They were more likely to be killed because their poor living conditions and poor health made it much more likely that they would catch and die of plague. They would also, on average, have lower g than the higher classes, meaning they would be less forward-thinking and so less likely to follow strategies that would help them avoid catching the plague, such as avoiding people that seemed to have it. As such, we would expect that the Black Death would have increased the average IQ of Medieval Europe quite dramatically. The Black Death was followed by a period of depression and war, which would likewise have heavily affected the poor, which ended towards the end of the 15th century. It is likely no coincidence, therefore, that the Renaissance, a marked period of intellectual curiosity, began in earnest around one hundred years after the Black Death. Furthermore, with a much-reduced population, living standards significantly increased; further aiding intellectual development. The end of this period, around the middle to late 17th century, was also marked by plague and famine and it may be that this assisted the development of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution by, once more, boosting European g in a relatively sudden way.
Cutting Through it All with General Intelligence
These theories are all extremely thought-provoking and are the products of some of humanity’s greatest and most pensive minds. But they raise a very simple question: what is underpinning the whole process? The essence of science is ‘reductionism’—trying to get down to the simplest possible root cause of things; striving to achieve a theory of everything. What is it that is behind the way in which civilisations appear to rise and fall, flower and decay?
Whatever answer we suggest, there will be those who will accuse us of over-simplifying things, who will nit-pick the validity of the model by noting that it doesn’t work precisely with some obscure civilisation or other; or demand that we respond to an infinite regress of very unlikely possible alternative explanations before we can possibly have any confidence in our case. Our response to those people is that this is real life and real life doesn’t work like this. If someone told you not to get out of your car in the Woburn Abbey Safari Park lion enclosure in Bedfordshire because the lions will probably kill you, we would suggest that is a very good piece of advice based on empirical evidence regarding how lions behave. Of course, if you wanted, you could assert that it was simplistic to argue that all lions are dangerous. You could highlight some outlier example of a really friendly lion that licks children and befriends kittens. You could demand that we prove that all people who have previously been killed by lions didn’t in fact coincidentally die of something else in the presence of the lion. Or you could ask, with great profundity, ‘But, what do you mean by “lion”?’ and refuse to accept the argument until ‘lion’ is perfectly defined, which, obviously, no category can be because they all involve drawing artificial borders; breaking up reality into manageable chunks that allow us to make successful predictions. If you followed these pseudo-intellectual strategies at the Safari Park in Bedfordshire, you would almost certainly be killed by a lion. As such, they fail the philosophical test of pragmatism, a test proposed by the American philosopher William James (1842–1910).[29] Pragmatism argues that theories are tools to better understand, and find our way through, the world. Following the kind of arguments we have highlighted would simply lead to death, because no decisions could ever be made. They are intellectual posing and should be dismissed out of hand.
So, having despatched such arguments, what is the fundamental factor behind the growth and shrinkage of great societies throughout history? We would argue that the fundamental issue, as Ronald Fisher earlier argued, is ‘intelligence’, or more specifically ‘g’. Put simply, in their early stages civilisations have relatively low g and are extremely unstable and dangerous places to live. People are under extreme conditions of group selection. For this reason, they are highly religious, as religiousness is associated with stress.[30] Religiousness has been shown to be weakly negatively associated with g in many different societies among population samples.[31] It is also positively associated with positive ethnocentrism (the belief that your society is superior and a desire to make sacrifices for your society) and negative ethnocentrism (the belief that other societies are inferior).[32]
As already noted, research with computer models has shown that the more ethnocentric a society is, the more internally cooperative it will be. All things being equal, a more ethnocentric society will always predominate over a less ethnocentric one, according to computer models. In these models, you set up a grid with different coloured dots, which reproduce asexually at certain intervals. If you ‘cooperate’ when you are next to another dot, you damage yourself slightly but you aid the other dot. There are four kinds of dot or ‘agent’: humanitarians (they always cooperate), selfish (they never cooperate), ethnocentrics (they only cooperate with their own colour), and traitors (they only cooperate with other colours). Eventually, after a number of generations, the ethnocentrics dominate the grid.[33] This means, and this is a point that will become very important later, religion can be understood as a matter of group selection. When two roughly similar groups are in conflict, because they are expanding, there will be group selection for religiousness. The more religious group under these conditions will triumph.
As such, in the early stages of civilisation there is individual level selection for g and a kind of selection—at the group level and even the individual level—for religiousness. Society has a sense of divine purpose, is strongly united, it is under intense selection pressure, and it is becoming ever more intelligent, as only the richest pass on their genes. Assuming the selection intensity for g is strong enough, the society will develop into a civilisation—of great intellectual ability—and become highly urbanised. However, this will also be its undoing. In effect, it will become ‘too intelligent’ and this will lead to the civilisation’s collapse.
Religiousness has been shown to be associated with stress, as we have already noted. People become more religious at times of stress, religious experiences tend to occur at times of stress, and those who are high in Neuroticism—meaning they suffer strongly from stress—are prone to periods of religiousness.[34] Religiousness is about 40% heritable, so it seems to be an evolved disposition, one of the purposes of which is to help us cope with stress.[35] With a very high level of average g, society will create an environment that is so low in stress—at least for the better off—that they will become less religious, something which will also occur due to their very high level of g.
This will have further consequences. Stress is also likely to engender fertility, as producing lots of children hedges against the fact that relatively few may survive—thus with the relaxation of environmental and social stress, fewer children need to be produced. Simply put, knowing that they don’t need a large family to guarantee the survival of their children, intelligent people will only have a small family. Also, their high g and interest in intellectual pursuits may mean that they manage to rationalise having no children at all. By contrast, those with lower g, who are relatively more impulsive, will have high fertility, by accident. In previous times, these accidental offspring would have likely died young. But in a society with better living conditions and better medical knowledge, this will be less likely to happen. In addition, as the standard of living increases, stress levels will be reduced and people will become more altruistic and caring towards the less fortunate in society and will be wealthy enough to sustain them with a system of welfare. These processes will remove checks on the fertility of the poor and thus on those lower in g. It will reduce the strength of selection favouring higher g.
Virtue Signalling and Equality
At the same time, members of this comfortable elite will compete for intellectual or moral status with other members of the elite by critiquing the society’s religious traditions and attempting to display their altruism, a point made by the German psychologist Volkmar Weiss.[36] The rise of social media has brought the subject of competition for moral and intellectual status into stark relief. Whenever there is a tragedy, such as the terrorist attacks in Paris in 2015, Facebook will soon be awash with slogans such as ‘Pray for Paris’ or people altering their profile picture so that the background is the French flag. Such behaviour, of course, in no way helps to fight terrorism or assist those who are affected by it. It is simply a form of virtue signalling; a way of indicating to the community that you are a kind person, kindness being a socially and sexually valued quality. The effect of this, however, is to create an arms race of competitive altruism and this can be seen in the changes in focus of the political left in England since the 1940s.
In the 1940s, the focus of the left was the condition of the working class. This was at a point at which there were still influential people who were opposed to concepts such as the National Health Service, high levels of unemployment benefit, redistributive taxation, and similar ideas. Once everybody, in public at least, pretty much accepted these ideas then status could no longer be accrued by advocating them. So, a competition developed to continuously increase levels of unemployment benefit and also to move the focus onto the issues of racism and sexism. People began to signal their superior virtue by stressing how non-racist they were. This led to a new anti-racism arms race until almost nobody would openly admit to being racist by the 1990s. And so while this arms race continues, a new one began with regard to sexual orientation and signalling your virtue by stressing how much you want to help those of a non-traditional sexual orientation. This arms race has led to innovations that would have been unthinkable twenty years earlier, such as gay marriage and unisex public toilets.
But another arms race occurs at the same time. We might term this an ‘intellectual’ arms race. The elite compete with one another to signal their high g and originality. They do this by questioning and critiquing all aspects of tradition. There is a strong focus on questioning religious tradition but this can extend to questioning all traditional norms, including the social hierarchy, sex roles, traditional models of sexuality, and so forth. Again, this creates an arms race of ever more extreme views which eventually become the norm.
This will have the effect of undermining the basis of the traditional hierarchy and permitting the rise of new forms of religion, which help to promote those who are not part of the elite. And they will then promote ideologies based around equality, as these will be in their interests. This will contribute to an atmosphere in which all people must be considered equal. This being the case, it will be difficult and even dangerous to attempt to advocate a policy which would reverse the process of g decline, a point also made by Volkmar Weiss.[37] Policies of this kind simply could not be instituted in a democracy. Weiss also observes that democracy and socialism are obvious examples of these equality-based ideologies. They both treat all people as equal (either in absolute terms, or in terms of their capacity to jointly contribute to the commonweal via political participation) and, in the case of socialism, transfer resources from those with higher g to those with lower levels, aiding the genetic interests of those with lower g.
And this will be potentiated by the decline of religion. When you control for social class, religiousness is a significant predictor of fertility: the more religious you are, the bigger your family is likely to be. This may be because many religions teach that children are a blessing from God and you should have as many as possible. But, as the elite become more intelligent, less stressed, and less religious, their fertility is likely to be impacted for this reason. There’s no God who demands they ‘go forth and multiply’, so why bother? Why not just ‘drink, eat and be merry, for tomorrow we shall die’? By having a small number of—or even no—children, such people help to preserve a relatively high standard of living, but it is at the expense of their genetic interests. This compounds the g decline and also leads to a society—and particularly its elite—that is low in ethnocentrism and is nihilistic. These views will spread down the society as the elite tends to be imitated in a process known as ‘trickle effect’,[38] highlighted by the German sociologist Georg Simmel (1858–1918). Also, people lower and lower down the society will be less and less stressed.
As g declines, society will stop working as well, levels of crime will increase, levels of trust will collapse, and democracy will be debased. We have already observed the way in which, as societies develop, social differences become more pronounced. Indeed, the French economist Thomas Piketty has shown—using 250 years of French tax records—that wealth inequality increases as economic growth increases.[39] So, because no religious certainty sanctifies the position of the (ever more elite) elite, they will find themselves challenged by organised members of the proletariat advocating ideologies of equality. As these grow in power, the decline in g will become even more pronounced as resources are transferred from the rich to the poor, encouraging the latter to be more fertile. As such, an internal proletariat or external proletariat will be able to take over, and we will now be in the winter of civilisation. As the society lacks the unifying force of religiousness, it will be easy for Ibn Khaldun’s ‘desert tribesmen’ to invade the society. The society will stop innovating and will eventually start to go backwards, becoming less rational and more religious as levels of stress begin to increase. This is likely to continue until it returns to pre-modern levels of selection for g. From this it will—in some form—rise from the ashes. In other words, the society will continue to decay until conditions are so harsh that selection for g and religiousness are re-established and then, as Ibn Khaldun argues, the cycle will begin all over again.
Even the Malthusian model—which is in theory entirely environmental—would be less question-begging if g were a dimension of it. As Volkmar Weiss has noted, under Malthusian conditions, intelligence is positively associated with fertility and, thus, continuously selected for. However, this eventually leads to an Industrial Revolution in which the pace of development—and the rise in living standards—outpaces population growth. As such, the Malthusian cycle—of a period of wealth leading to an unsustainably high population and thus a population collapse—is broken. The population climbs and climbs and g is no longer being selected for. Indeed, with the rise of reliable contraception and very high living standards, selection for g goes into reverse. Eventually, due to the resultant decline, society will run out of ways to sustain its rising population. Indeed, this would be reflected in declining per capita major innovation rates, which we have already discussed. The population will lose its ability to master systems that were comprehensible when societal g was higher. This will lead to a population collapse, uprisings, and a decline of civilisation. In addition, we can add that the decline of religion—caused partly by the society’s high standard of living—would mean the elite were no longer united or motivated, making a revolution more likely to succeed. However, it is quite likely that the higher g members of the population—who would be wealthier and more far-sighted—would be more likely to survive this societal collapse. Thus, the collapse of civilisation would boost the g of the remnant population, such that the cycle of development could begin anew.
Climate Change
However, there is another model of the collapse of populations which may also contribute to understanding these cycles. It has been proposed that the key culprit may in fact be climate change.[40] Cold temperatures are known to make populations more violent. This makes sense, as crops are more likely to fail when the weather is inclement, thus starving populations will seek to expand in order to secure resources. It has been noted that temperatures were considerably lower in Early Modern Era Europe than they are today. This was due to the Little Ice Age, which corresponded with a period of very low sunspot activity called the ‘Maunder Minimum’. Research has shown that cold correlates with warfare and inter-group violence—the Little Ice Age corresponding with a series of extremely violent conflicts in Europe called the General Crisis of the 17th Century.[41] Recall that this was a period of extremely high mortality, especially among the poor, and also downward social mobility (as described by Gregory Clark, whom we met earlier). So, if the cold and hunger didn’t kill you, violence or disease would, hence the cold, both directly and indirectly, promoted the fitness of those with high g. Recall also that geniuses were increasing in prevalence during this time period. Again, this would be consistent with the presence of inter-group conflict and group selection—the geniuses being most numerous in the biggest, smartest, and most successful groups.
During this time period, the most successful populations (such as the British) were establishing empires. These caused massive additional population growth to occur. By the start of the Late Modern Era in the mid-18th century, global temperatures had started to increase, however. The ecological stress on the populations of Europe would have started to reduce. Fewer people died of exposure or hunger. Populations became more peaceful as well, with conflict dropping to very low levels after the Napoleonic Wars in a period called Pax Brittanica—literally the ‘British Peace’.[42] This was a time period in which the fruits of genius were making life more tolerable for everyone. There were innovations in hygiene, medicine, and labour saving technologies. These boosted economic efficiency and led to social innovations, such as the first serious welfare economy having first been introduced in Germany in the 1870s.[43] Less distressed and better looked-after but ultimately pacified populations fell into the regime of individual-level selection favouring those with low IQs, which became exacerbated as it became easier for high-IQ individuals to better control their fertility.
