Can our civilisation really change? Ayaan Hirsi Ali: How to Win the Clash of Civilizations. Values, Trust and Reputation in an Increasingly Complex World. Both present and future leaders expect the business environment to grow significantly more complex over time.
This is one of the main conclusions of two recent studies conducted by IBM, the 2010 Global CEO Study, and the companion student study, Inheriting a Complex World. CEOs and senior government leaders - who I presume are mostly in their 50s and members of the Baby Boom Generation, - said that their primary challenge is figuring out how to operate in a world that is substantially more volatile, uncertain and complex. The students, on the other hand - mostly Millennials in their 20s, - understand implicitly and intuitively that economies, societies and organizations are interconnected and interdependent.
They don’t even need a definition of complexity, since that is the only world they have ever known. The Millennials are in a very different space. As different studies keep finding, we might be in a values-based generational transition as potentially profound as the sixties. Pandora's Seed: The Unforeseen Cost of Civilization. Moral Decay and Civilizational Rebirth. John Robb at Global Guerrillas: JOURNAL: Moral Decay?
Moral decay is often cited as a reason for why empires/civilizations collapse. The slow failure of the US mortgage market, the largest debt market in the world and the shining jewel of the US economic/financial system, is a good example of moral decay at work. Why is this market failing? It’s being gutted — from wholesale fraud and ruthless profiteering at the bank/servicer level to strategic defaults at the homeowner level — because a relatively efficient and effective moral system is being replaced by a burdensome and ineffective one.
John is drawing on an intellectual tradition goes back to Gibbon, Ibn Khaldun, Polybius, Confucius and Mencius but is mashing it up with modern concepts of social complexity, such as is found in Joseph Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies . What if the historical ratchet could be reversed? Khan on Forage v Farm. Razib Khan on foragers vs. farmers: Cultures which are the most developed and least developed have the most equitable relations between the genders, while those in the middle are generally more conventionally male-dominated. … Plough farming societies tend to be more patriarchal [than hoe societies], all things equal. … Immigrants to the United States impart to their descendants the same values. … The majority of the world’s population are no longer primary producers, but most are recent descendants of primary producers.
Ultimately this goes back to the foragers & farmers debate. The above is a rather materialist economic reading of power relations. One could create a narrative of moral evolution over time, and the expansion of the arc of humanity with the spread of universal religions. I think the two variables are related, and in any case the description of what happened remains the same. We should not proliferate categories beyond what is needed. Sound familiar? Civilization Systems. Complexity and Collapse : Information Clearing House - ICH.