THE COMING DARK AGE Newsletter February, 2003 1.

INTRODUCTION This is the first issue of the 'Coming Dark Age' newsletter. The idea initially is to present short discussions of historical and topical subjects. These will revolve around both dark ages in general and the way in which our own civilisation will disappear in the dark age to come. I welcome comments, suggestions and contributions. Please forward this newsletter to anyone you think might be interested. Marc Widdowson 2. AD 476 AND THE FALL OF ROME The fall of the Roman Empire is traditionally dated to AD 476. This is when the emperor Romulus Augustulus was deposed by the barbarian chief Odovacar (also spelt Odoacer, and in other ways as well). It is worth looking at this event in more detail, because it shows the complexities of historical change. Civilisations do not really just 'fall' overnight. They transform in a gradual way that can seem perfectly natural at the time. It is only later that historians impose arbitrary turning points on the seamless flow of events. This is relevant to us because it means that the signs of our own decline, or even collapse, will not be obvious and unambiguous in terms of daily events. It is only by looking at the big picture that we may see what is going on. Returning to Romulus Augustulus, the first thing to appreciate is that he was only the ruler of the western Roman empire. Since the days of Diocletian (emperor, 284-305), there had usually been a system of dual emperors-one for the eastern and one for the western half of the empire. This reflected the difficulties of governing such a huge undertaking. When Romulus Augustulus was deposed, the eastern emperor Zeno continued in power, ruling from Constantinople. In fact, the eastern Roman empire remained intact for another thousand years. It was finally ended when the Ottoman Turks seized Constantinople in AD 1453. Romulus Augustulus was the teenage son of Orestes, the commander of the Roman army in Italy. Orestes had made his son (puppet) emperor in AD 475. This was after at least two decades of disruptions in the imperial line. In fact, since AD 400, the real power in Italy had tended to be in the hands of barbarian generals who had made a career for themselves in the Roman army. The chief of these were Stilicho (a Vandal, c. 365-408), Aetius (c. 390-450) and Ricimer (a Suevian, d. 472). These barbarian generals had deposed and elevated a series of emperors. The throne sometimes remained empty for months at a time while

political horse-trading went on. Orestes, who came from the region of Croatia, was simply carrying on in this vein. His son's official name as emperor was Romulus Augustus. The 'Augustulus' is a diminutive, or patronising nickname. Odovacar was yet another barbarian general, from the German tribe known as the Scirae. When Orestes lost control of his soldiers, apparently because there was not enough money to pay them, Odovacar organised a coup. He killed Orestes but allowed Romulus Augustulus to retire to an estate near Naples, where as far as we know he quietly lived out the rest of his days. On past form, Odovacar's next action might have been to set up his own emperor. Instead, Odovacar seems to have decided that the whole idea of a western emperor was really superfluous. Odovacar sent messages to the emperor Zeno to say in effect that Zeno could now consider himself ruler of the whole of the Roman empire, although Odovacar himself, having been made a patrician, would take effective charge of the western provinces. The reality was that the western empire was already in tatters at this stage. Britain had been lost when the last Roman legions withdrew in AD 410. Meanwhile, Gaul and Spain had been overrun by a series of tribes: Vandals, Sueves, Alans, Franks and Visigoths. Odovacar did not in any way mean to cause the fall of the Roman empire. He was just facing up to the practicalities of the situation. It is doubtful whether anyone in Italy noticed that anything had changed. It was all purely nominal. The traditions of Roman life continued. A consul was appointed annually, and the senate continued to function. Furthermore, Odovacar removed the Visigoths from Sicily, so that he could actually be seen as helping to bolster and restore the empire. It is not even clear that Romulus Augustulus was the last western emperor. Another claimant to the imperial throne, called Julius Nepos, continued to exist in Dalmatia, and Zeno asked Odovacar to respect his position. Julius Nepos did not die until 480. The eastern Roman empire did not fully lose its authority until the arrival of the Ostrogoths a few years later. But that is another story.

3. FROM COLUMBUS TO COLUMBIA The Columbia disaster brings the space shuttle failure rate to nearly 2 percent. With this kind of failure rate, Heathrow airport would see ten major air crashes every day. It is perhaps not surprising that shuttle flights have been suspended indefinitely, while investigators try to find out what went wrong. Shuttle flights are unlikely to be resumed in less than 12 months. But even if they are, there will no replacement orbiter in the immediate future. Many observers believe that Columbia will not be replaced at all. Cash-strapped NASA is likely to place its hopes on the second

generation shuttle, which is not due to fly for nearly a decade. This jeopardises the International Space Station. It was already running into trouble because the Russians said that they could not afford to launch the number of flights that they were supposed to. Now that the shuttle is grounded, it will be as much as the international partners can do to keep the space station ticking over. Building work seems bound to be stalled, and it is touch and go whether the present crew will be replaced. At the time of the moon-landings, over thirty years ago, NASA had a very ambitious space programme. This would have seen a permanent moon base by now, and American flags flying over Mars. This programme rapidly crumbled and the early promise of the Apollo missions disappeared. It is an example of 'innovation failure'-the classic syndrome of declining civilisations that caused the Romans for example to invent but never really exploit the waterwheel and other technologies. One of the factors behind this innovation failure is our extreme sensitivity to risk. The loss of seven astronauts aboard the space shuttle Columbia was shocking and upsetting, and of course very sad for those directly affected-the astronauts' families, friends and colleagues. However, in the grand scheme of things, these seven deaths were a minor blow. Far more people died in road accidents on the same day, as well as on each day before and since. In the end, human beings can only learn from their mistakes, and something as grandly difficult as the conquest of space cannot be achieved without death, for humans are after all mortal. In the years following Columbus, many sailors lost their lives pioneering the ocean routes. Ferdinand Magellan, leader of the first expedition to circumnavigate the earth, was killed en route, and only one of his five ships made it home again. Yet the Europeans of that era did not suspend ocean voyaging after each accident. Life in those days was cheap, and they kept sending out more voyages, gradually improving their navigational knowledge and the design of their ships. Eventually sea travel became routine and (reasonably) safe. With us, space travel cannot become routine until it is completely safe. Yet it cannot be completely safe until it is routine. This paradox stymies progress. If we had the attitude of the early European voyagers, we would build shuttle after shuttle, sending them into orbit in growing numbers. We would not have stuck at a fleet of just four, as NASA in fact did. It might be said that this is because space flight is too costly. However, it would not be so costly if we exploited other energy sources-only that is another innovation failure, which will have to be discussed in another article. Similarly, it may seem uncaring to call the death of the Columbia crew a minor blow. Yet the astronauts themselves-and their bereaved families too-would have that kind of ruthless attitude. They would have wanted space exploration to continue and not to be held up by their deaths.

It was this kind of ruthless attitude that allowed our adventurous ancestors to achieve so much-and it is the kind of attitude that will emerge after the coming dark age. This is why I believe that the people who come after the dark age will succeed in the conquest of space while we will not. On the other hand, the Columbia accident may help the cause of space flight along. The more accidents we have, the more people will get used to them. They will come to seem acceptable, and no longer a reason for suspending launches indefinitely. It is noticeable that the reaction to the loss of Columbia has not been as overwhelming as the reaction to the loss of Challenger in 1986. In this case, I could be proved wrong, and the space programme may take off again in a big way in our own era. At least, that might be a possibility if there were not so many other signs and portents of a coming dark age. THE COMING DARK AGE Newsletter March, 2003 1. INTRODUCTION This is the second issue of the 'Coming Dark Age' newsletter. At the time of writing, the world is expecting imminent war in Iraq. In fact, 'war' is something of a misnomer. Few people expect that the largely disarmed Iraqi military will present much of a challenge to the technologically advanced United States forces. The test of American power is not really its ability to bomb the hell out of Iraq -- that goes without question. It is more whether the coming action is a genuine form of imperialism that brings peace and stability to the world, or whether it simply adds to the chaos, hatred and economic troubles of our pre-dark age society. This issue of the newsletter contains a description of the military embroilments of the later Roman empire, plus some observations on a modern 'innovation failure', and a piece by a reader explaining the background to London's new 'eruv'. Comments, suggestions and contributions are welcomed. Please forward this newlsetter to anyone who might be interested. Marc Widdowson. 2. BYZANTINE POLICY IN THE WEST After the fall of Rome, the western half of the Roman empire was in the hands of a variety of barbarian tribes: Anglo-Saxons in Britain, Franks in Gaul, Visigoths and Sueves in Spain, Ostrogoths and later Lombards in Italy, Vandals in North Africa. To the Byzantine emperors, who continued to rule the eastern empire from Constantinople (aka Byzantium), this situation was not as inevitable or unrecoverable as it may seem to us now. They continued to take an active interest in the west, with the aim of either ruling through the barbarians or, where possible, reasserting direct imperial government. A key technique was that of paying subsidies to one barbarian group to wage war on another. This is the phenomenon of 'hegemony by bribery', which is familiar to

us today as the United States buys influence over lesser countries with aid packages and trade deals. It was how the Visigoths came to occupy Spain, as they originally entered the peninsular alongside Roman generals in a campaign to defeat the Vandals who were the first to overrun the former imperial province. After the Vandals had crossed to Africa, the Visigoths remained, nominally as Roman allies who had been rewarded with tax-gathering rights. Similarly, during the sixth century, the Franks received a number of payments from Byzantium to cross the Alps and attack the Lombards. The hope was that the barbarian groups who were induced to fight each other would both be weakened as a result, and the empire would be able to step in and pick up the pieces. Unfortunately, the barbarians were clever enough to see through this, and they tended to fight only in a limited way. Another technique favoured by the Byzantine emperors was to back particular candidates and pretenders to the throne in the barbarian kingdoms. The idea here was naturally that those who came to the throne with their assistance would adopt policies more favourable to the Romans. Again, this policy seldom worked out in practice. In some cases, the Roman-backed rebellions failed in their objectives. And when the rebels did gain the leadership, they often turned against their Roman supporters. In the modern world, the United States has coined the term 'blowback' to describe this problem, whereby the 'freedom fighters' that have been supported with American resources end up using them to attack the west itself. 3. CONGESTION CHARGING The Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, has introduced a 'congestion charge' zone in the centre of the city. Drivers must pay 5 pounds to enter the zone, the idea being to discourage traffic and make the streets flow more easily. Roughly a month into the scheme, it seems that traffic levels have been reduced by about 20 per cent. Widespread predictions that traffic would merely be diverted to the boundary of the zone, which would then be gridlocked, have failed to materialise. Predictions of a high error-rate in the process of identifying and fining drivers who enter the zone without purchasing a ticket have come true, but perhaps these can be reduced with time, and it remains the case that traffic is less. By its own terms, the congestion charging scheme has been a success. However, this scheme is also a classic example of the failure of imagination that one gets in a declining civilisation. In Calcutta, traffic problems are also horrendous, but the mayor of that city is building an ambitious configuration of roads and flyovers in order to get the traffic moving. In Britain, by contrast, the approach seems to be to discourage people from moving at all. Yet traffic is a sign of economic vigour. People need to move around in order to make an economy work. Historical societies, or modern countries with minimal transport infrastructures, are inevitably poor, as customers cannot get to suppliers. Congestion charging is itself part of a wider campaign designed to slow things down and discourage movement -- including speed bumps, more stringent speed limits, and proliferation of traffic cameras. This is not to say that

there are no problems with congestion and road accidents, but the significant thing is that we adopt crude social solutions rather than technological ones. Instead of meeting people's need to travel -- a need that was obviously strong enough not to be put off by the congestion that used to exist in central London -- we try to make the prospect so daunting that they simply give up. The road safety campaigners, it sometimes seems, would be glad to get us back to the stage where a man with a red flag had to walk in front of every car. Ken Livingstone would like to ban cars from London altogether. Perhaps that will eventually happen. It comes as no surprise to know that Rome was 'pedestrianised' during the centuries of decline, and traffic was only permitted in the city after nightfall. 4. LONDON'S ERUV London recently saw the launching of an 'eruv' -- a zone, marked out by poles and wire, within which the Sabbath restrictions on Orthodox Jews are somewhat relaxed. This seems to be a kind of self-imposed ghettoization, or at any rate an accentuation of cultural difference. It is typical of the process of socio-cultural fragmentation or polarisation that, in dark age theory, is known as 'social discohesion'. This polarisation is not just between Jews and the wider society, but within the Jewish community itself. Dark age reader, Naomi Ogus, explains... The eruv is put in a place where there are many shades of Jewish (and non-Jewish) people, i.e. different levels of observance and philosophy. The authority that is responsible for making this eruv (boundary) kosher, is the London Beth Din (Jewish Law Court) who oversee matters of kosher meat and have the power to define "who is a Jew" in Britain. Since they have to accommodate all Anglo Jewry in Britain, they have limited effectiveness. Most Orthodox folk living in Golders Green, Hendon, Temple Fortune, Finchley Central etc. will not use it because it is a good thing to be seen to be following the highest authority (even those who work within the Beth Din itself will not use their own creation). In effect, a competition of who is more religiously observant takes effect. So, by creating this invisible boundary for twenty five hours, it's creating a visible division within Anglo Jewry for the first time -- those who will be seen to be pushing buggies and those who won't. I know from experience that this part of the world is extremely inward looking and social coercion is rife. It may seem petty, but to those within it, it is anything but. So maybe by physically making this boundary it is creating others, or making others that were already there more sharply defined. Of course the people who most violently react against it are the non-observant community -usually reform and liberal Jews who are strongly against anything Orthodox. They feel threatened by observance going on around them, and self conscious as if they are somehow second best, illegitimate. The non-Jews couldn't care less, unless someone decided to use this issue and stick an anti-Semitic spin on it if they so choose. What makes this eruv different from others is the fact that there are so many different shades of tradition and observance concentrated in one small area (a

bit like Israel if you think about it). The difference is, of course that it is in England and not the Middle East where differences of opinion can be avoided and denied. Israel is good at getting things out into the open. There are successful eruvs in other places because a more uniform (in belief) orthodox community lives side by side and so there are never usually many arguments -- Antwerp, New York (Crown Heights, Flatbush etc). It's just a British thing. Suddenly the big thing that they have been talking about for years comes along and people can't cope. This thing is asking them to put their colours to the mast, so to speak. THE COMING DARK AGE Newsletter April, 2003 1. INTRODUCTION Many people who hear I am writing about the coming dark age tell me that the basic problem is that the world is running out of natural resources. They say that I must pay attention to that. Therefore this issue of the coming dark age newsletter looks at natural resources and the problem of future shortages. I welcome comments, suggestions and contributions. Please forward this newsletter to anyone you think might be interested. Marc Widdowson 2. THE EHRLICH-SIMON BET The ecologist Paul Ehrlich has long been predicting that modern technological civilisation will culminate in an environmental catastrophe, and has said that a major part of this will be desperate shortages of the raw materials on which technology depends. He has pointed out that oil is finite for example, while the ores of many minerals are increasingly difficult to work as the richest mines have been exhausted long ago. However, the late economist Julian Simon argued that Ehrlich was wrong. He said that scarcity of raw materials never has been and never will be an obstacle to human development. Simon and Ehrlich decided to put their disagreement to the test by means a bet. See here for a full account: http://www.overpopulation.com/faq/People/julian_simon.html. Basically, Ehrlich was allowed to pick five metals that he thought would be more expensive in ten years time due to their increasing scarcity. If they were indeed more expensive, he would win. If their prices had fallen, as Simon predicted, Simon would win. The upshot was that Simon won convincingly. The price of the metals fell, indicating that they had become less scarce not more scarce over the intervening period. How could this be? The answer relates to what Simon called "the ultimate resource"-i.e. human ingenuity. Take copper, which was one of the metals picked out by Ehrlich. Copper is heavily used in telephone wires, and as the world became

increasingly telephonised in the mid-twentieth century, the demand for copper grew immensely. Analysts like Ehrlich projected the trends forward, and thereby predicted that the growth in demand would soon outrun the supply, creating a huge crunch and a world crisis. Then someone invented the mobile phone: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/2963619.stm. This is not to mention satellite communications, microwave transmission and fibre optic cable. These technologies are not only far more efficient at carrying telephone calls, but they also use far less resources-and no wire means no copper. So the bottom dropped out of the copper market. Around the end of the nineteenth century, the English economist W S Jevons predicted that industrial society would break down by the year 2000 because of the exhaustion of coal reserves. In fact, over the last few decades, England has been closing down its mines because nobody wants the coal they could produce. Jevons got it wrong for much the same reasons as Ehrlich got the price of copper wrong. So today when people predict imminent disaster because of the exhaustion of the oil wells or other mineral resources, they ought to think for a moment about Jevons and Ehrlich. They ought to be sure that they are not overlooking the 'ultimate resource' and the possibility of future technological developments that will make their calculations completely irrelevant. 3. HOWEVER. On the other hand, the ultimate resource is something that itself becomes scarce in a declining civilisation. Technological development stagnates. People find that life is comfortable enough and they have no motivation to change. Vested interests obstruct new discoveries that might ruin their megabucks industries. Even though it was an American that invented the transistor, for instance, American companies declined to license the patent. That would have meant throwing away their existing product lines, designing new wares and retooling their manufacturing plants. They didn't want to do that. So instead the transistor patent was licensed by the Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Company, which was starting from scratch like the rest of post-war Japan. It produced the first transistor radio, and in 1958 changed its name to the Sony Corporation. (This is an example of the Phoenix Principle, by the way.) It is for these reasons that our society will seem to run out of resources. Future historians may say that western civilisation collapsed because the oil was all used up. But the truth is that lack of oil only became a problem because our society was already sick and rotten. We didn't create the opportunities that would have meant we didn't need to rely on oil any more. If we were still a half-decent civilisation, we would by now have invented marvellous new technologies that made the internal combustion engine as crude and outmoded as the horse and cart. We haven't, and somehow I don't think we will. It will have to wait until after the coming dark age.

THE COMING DARK AGE Newsletter May, 2003 1. INTRODUCTION This month's newsletter contains an explanation of the "Coming Dark Age" book/website along with an essay by a reader on the problems of oil and natural resource depletion. I welcome all comments, suggestions and contributions, especially the latter. Please forward this newsletter to anyone you think might be interested. Marc Widdowson 2. THE AIM OF THE COMING DARK AGE BOOK AND SITE Some people have commented on the "Coming Dark Age" saying things like "This is all very well, but what do you suggest we should do about it?" One reader said, "It is not clear what the aim is, except to convert us to a passive altruism," and suggested that I say more about "what, if anything, can be learned from the mistakes of past societies." Such comments show a fundamental misunderstanding of the Coming Dark Age message. At the heart of dark age theory is the Phoenix Principle, which states that things have to get worse before they can get better. I won't go into the Phoenix Principle in detail here, but the basic point is that dark ages are a vital, necessary and, yes, desirable aspect of the historical process. If there were no dark ages, the human race would tend towards equilibrium, which means stagnation and the cessation of all progress. Dark ages throw everything back into the melting pot, breaking down the comfortable status quo and forcing humans to develop radical new solutions. Dark ages are like forest fires, which seem destructive but actually renew the forest by clearing out dead wood and allowing fresh, green growth to come through. The bigger the dark age, the more radical the thinking and the greater the amount of progress that is made. So it is not a case of past societies making 'mistakes' that we can learn from, and it is not a case of us trying to stop dark ages from happening. There are many particular reasons why dark ages might have occurred in the past, just as there are many particular reasons why a forest may catch fire. But if it hadn't been one thing, it would have eventually been another, and the truly important thing is the role that fires play in the ecology of the forest and that dark ages play in history. Let me say it again. Dark ages are not mistakes. They are not accidents. They are inextricably bound up with the way that history works. There have always been dark ages, and there always will be. So the aim of "The Coming Dark Age" is obviously not to suggest how we can avoid the mistakes of the past and prevent the dark age that is to come. It is to convey a deeper understanding of history and of our current situation. It is to show that what is happening today has not only happened many times before

but actually must happen for the long term benefit of the human race. It is to say, "Yes, our civilisation is crumbling into selfishness, disorder and financial bankruptcy, but don't despair, it is not the end of the world. This is simply what happens to civilisations, and while it seems very much like the problem, it is actually the solution." My aim is to help people see things as they really are. That is all. But it seems like a worthwhile aim to me. 3. RESOURCE DEPLETION In the last newsletter I discussed the Ehrlich-Simon bet and explained why resource depletion is not a fundamental obstacle to human progress. I do not deny that problems with resources might play a role in the ending of our civilisation, but this will only be the immediate reason. The fundamental reason is our failing imagination as a civilisation, which stops us from exploiting the huge reservoirs of resources that exist in the oceans, deep in the earth's crust, and on the moon and asteroids. We may think that those reservoirs remain permanently beyond human reach. Wrong! That very thinking is the reason we are going into decline. But after the dark age, when a new civilisation finally emerges from the ashes, it will find a way to do things that seem impossible to us. Nevertheless, many readers seem interested in the whole issue of resource depletion, including the phenomenon of 'peak oil,' and, as I have said, in the short term that may play a role in our demise. In the next section, I therefore present an interesting essay by a reader about precisely this issue. 4. THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME (Note: numbers in brackets refer to notes at the end) 4.1 Background. My apologies to H.G. Wells for use of the title but we are fast approaching a turning point in the history of mankind. There are limits to the amount of oil, natural gas and other fossil fuels available to industrial man. The peak of oil discoveries in the lower forty-eight states of the USA was 1930 and peak production 1970. For the world the peak of discoveries was in the fifties and sixties. The last major discoveries, the North Sea and Alaska reserves date from the sixties. These areas have been exploited and are now in decline. The forecast overall peak of world oil production is now and will soon be declining according to the methodology of King Hubbert. (1) The vast majority of the world's recoverable oil has been discovered. There have been no major oil discoveries in the last thirty years to significantly delay the end of the oil age. We already know about almost all the oil reserves that exist in the world. THERE IS NO MORE! (3) The percentage of GDP that is energy related has dropped for several reasons lulling us into a false sense of security. Some reasons are;

- The use of more efficient electric motors - Railroads using AC traction with VFD's in locomotives rather than DC. - Improvements in aircraft such as the use of high bypass engines, super-critical airfoil designs, vortex breakers on wingtips, using the jet stream etc. - More fuel efficient cars, trucks etc. - The use of combined cycle electric generation facilities. Note that these units all use natural gas as a source of fuel. - Increased and better heat conservation (insulation) techniques in buildings and process plants etc. and residential hosing. The price of oil is less relevant to production and supply than we believe. The market price is determined by current economic conditions with readily available oil. For the production of oil, or any basic source of energy what matters ultimately is the amount of energy expended to get a given quantity of oil (energy) to market. In 1950 it took one barrel of oil energy to get fifty-five out of the ground. Now for one barrel of oil energy we only get a return of five and that is declining. Within a few years the energy cost to extract oil will be greater than energy contained in the oil in the ground in other words an energy sink. Spending more energy in recovery than the energy in the ground should not occur but inevitably will until we come to our senses. Take a look at the energy investment in projects like Hibernia on the Grand Banks off Newfoundland and the energy cost of bringing the oil to market. Look at the energy capital and operating costs of the project per recoverable barrel. Hibernia oil has a very high wax content and has to be kept at a very high temperature to enable it to be pumped. It costs energy to maintain the oil at the required temperature. Tertiary recovery from oil fields by steam or chemical injection, SAGD etc. costs energy and will only briefly delay the inevitable. We are fast approaching a balance between the energy cost of recovery and the energy recovered. Thereafter it will cost more energy than we will obtain from oil recovery. We have the ability to get oil from the greatest depths of the tar sands of northern Alberta and other difficult areas but what if any is the net gain in usable energy? Are some of these oil reserves destined to become 'energy sinks' gobbling up more energy to extract than the energy they produce? Production will start a steep decline between 2010 and 2020 and will be twenty to thirty percent lower by 2030. The end of the oil age will be some time just after 2050. There is no turning back. There will still be a small amount of oil production in 2100 and beyond but not enough to maintain industrial man. 4.2 Forecast for years 2010 to 2020 and beyond Following are a few of the problems that mankind will face but not necessarily in the order presented.

As the limits of oil and natural gas resources become more evident there will be rising oil and natural gas prices. This should occur before 2010. Money will likely be invested in oil exploration resulting in some minor finds but the likelihood of any major discoveries is extremely remote. People will cut back on discretionary spending with holiday resorts and cruise lines being hit first. Airlines business will drop and aircraft manufacturing will slump. As we keep our material possessions longer instead of throwing them away manufacturing and retail sales will decline as will the restaurant and fast food business with eating at home and gardening becoming more common. Ocean shipping will become more expensive and this will be reflected in the price of everything shipped around the world. World trade will contract. Because of business slumps, drop in GDP etc. there will be massive unemployment and social unrest around the world. There will be hyperinflation as governments try to spend their way out of trouble. Gold will become more of a store of value as paper 'fiat' money and other forms of investment become worthless. Real estate values will depend on location. Future societies (2) will be unpleasant and very different to those of today until we reach a post-industrial stability. Food production drops as fertilizer and diesel fuel become more expensive. The oil created and dependent 'phantom' acres will vanish. The USA will no longer have food surpluses and will need to import but from where? Within the last decade China has now become even more dependent than ever on importing food. The populations of China and India are still growing and within a few years Indians will outnumber Chinese if current trends continue. Fuel rationing will be imposed by governments depending on availability and need for oil by organizations and individuals. Car and truck sales drop as commuters turn to transit systems resulting in more money being spent in that area. Natural gas and oil shortages in harsh winter environments prompt people to move to warmer locations. What will all the gas heated dwellings in Canada and the USA use when natural gas production declines. The combined cycle electric generation facilities will no longer be able to provide electricity when gas supplies become depleted. There will be a drop in population around the world but it will be uneven. The population of Russia is currently in decline even as other areas of the world are still experiencing an increase in their numbers. The large countries by area, of the world will possibly break up into smaller more manageable entities and the European Union will disappear with all the countries reverting back to their original sovereign status. The UN as we know it will vanish. Societies that have not become heavily dependent on oil will have a better chance of survival. Chiapas in Mexico is one example and there

are other areas. Southern California will be a disaster area being almost one hundred percent dependent on oil for its life style. Conflict in Middle East and Central Asia over oil is inevitable as China, India and Europe compete for dwindling oil supplies and possibly end up in a war with the US. Geo-politically the era of European domination of the world is fast drawing to a close. Birth rates among white Europeans (4) are at an all time low, way below replacement levels. While the US is currently the dominant world power with no serious challengers to it's hegemony in sight we should not forget that Britain was in a similar position in 1914. It was greatly weakened by The Great War and went from being top dog or should I say Bulldog to needing the help of the USA to fight Germany and Japan in less than twenty five years. Even though Britain still had its empire it was to loose most of it to independence movements by the sixties. The United States is the last European Imperial power and much of the resentment against European Imperialism in former colonies will now be directed their way. Many peoples in various parts of the world have been dominated and betrayed by the Imperial European powers and nowhere has that sense of betrayal generated more hostility than in the Middle East where it forms a toxic mix when combined with oil and religious conflict. The US currently has a military presence in over one hundred and forty countries and in many the populations have very anti American feelings. The fall of the US is likely to be quicker and more dramatic than that of Britain but more painful because of oil shortages although not as swift as the demise of the Soviet Union. Currently China and India are developing, getting a greater appetite for oil and more significant military and economic clout but it is debatable as to what the future holds for them. Both China and India have an advantage over the Europeans in that they can say that they know what it is like to be under European domination. It is little mentioned but both WW1 and WW2 were in part fought over resources. Germany tried unsuccessfully, in both world wars, to get control of Caspian oil while Japan controlled the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) for a few years in the second world war. The rise and fall of the fortunes of countries have been tied to resources since before the Roman Empire and still are. In its heyday Britain was self sufficient in all the resources necessary to build its empire and influence in the world. The US followed but in 1970 reached a turning point when oil production in the lower forty eight states went into an irreversible decline. Today the US with around four percent of the worlds population consumes almost thirty percent of the worlds oil production. World oil production incidentally is around its peak now and will soon be declining. No major discoveries have been made since the sixties. The implications of this will have an impact in a number of areas. Within individual countries what social unrest will develop as people will not be able to fill their cars, heat their houses or buy food? Because of the addiction of Americans and Canadians to their cars and

materialistic lifestyle the impact of oil shortages will hit hardest. Will resource rich countries want to hold on to their resources and/or play off one desperate country against another? Will the US and other resource poor countries try to take the resources by the use of military force? The US invasion of Afghanistan and aggressive stance on Iraq, which has the second largest oil reserves is evidence that this is already happening. Note the bombing of Serbia a few years ago was mainly to secure a route to Europe for Caspian oil. Will there be civil unrest in other countries? Will there be a war between the US on one hand against China, India and Europe for the middle east oil? With the multitude of forces at play in Central Asia and the Middle East there are endless possibilities as to what the outcome could be. 4.3 Beyond oil All the scientific and technical knowledge accumulated over the last two hundred years will be available to post-industrial man. We will not go back to the way things were in 1800 at the start of the industrial revolution. There will still be the Internet, telephones, radio, computers and many other of the wonders of our age. Because of the collapse of our industrial society the levels of pollution of all kinds will drop. Heavy horses will once again be used in agriculture and for transport but will sailing ships make a comeback? Cities will slowly be depopulated or even abandoned as more will have to work in food production and inevitably live in the country. We will become much less of a throwaway society and materialism will significantly decline. We will keep things until they are worn out just as previous generations did. People will work and spend holidays closer to home and travel far less while family and friends will become more important to all. Much of what we need will be produced locally rather than transported from the other side of the world. Many of the skilled trades of yesteryear will make a comeback. Most of the symbols of our industrial age will be abandoned ruins. The refineries and office towers, the factories and assembly lines, the abandoned suburbs will remind the future generations of our age. What will future generations think of our superhighways when there are no cars and of course Las Vegas? After 2050 most of the social unrest will gradually subside and post-industrial society will stablilse as people have to work to survive. The world population will probably drop to around two billion by 2100 There are no magic bullets that will keep industrial man going. Forget shale oil, fusion, etc. Fortunes have been spent with little to show. Most of the recent technological improvements in fuel efficiency while worthwhile have been relatively minor and incremental. We have to learn to exploit renewable resources to our best advantage. There is no one answer. What is used will depend on location, availability of sunlight, wind, water and so on. Most people alive today will witness the initial collapse but few will

know what the final outcome is likely to be. Previously people lived from generation to generation with little need to look a long way into the future and ponder our actions. Nature always provided for us. The twentieth century was the first time in the history of the human race that there was a real need for mankind to take a long term hard look at where we had come from and where were are going, to ponder what we were doing to our home. We did not. We have failed miserably and are living as if the party can go on indefinitely. It can not. Most are in a state of denial but the end of the party is in sight. Jon Bryan Notes (1) King Hubbert was a geologist with Shell in the fifties who developed the best scientific method to date for forecasting oil production based on the experience of the oil industry in the lower forty-eight states of the USA. His forecasts made in the mid fifties that production would peak in 1970 in the lower forty-eight and thereafter go into an irreversible decline has proven accurate within five percent. A recently published book called Hubbert's Peak gives an analysis of the global energy scenario and predictions. For more information on the future of oil do a search for 'King Hubbert' on the Internet. (2) Take a look at the National Geographical Magazine of June 1974 and check out Hubberts curve of projected oil production. It is eerie how accurate his projection was. (3) For a grim look at what future societies might look like read Robert Kaplan's article 'The Coming Anarchy' in the Atlantic Monthly magazine on the Internet. He has also written a number of books worth reading on how societies are breaking down in various parts of the world. (4) For more on the impending energy crisis look up L. F. Ivanhoe and Novum Corp on the net. You will get links to many interesting sites from those searches. (5) In 1900 the white European population of the world was around fifteen percent. Today it is around seven percent and declining. (6) Two interesting websites relating to the declining oil reserves are http://www.oilcrisis.com and http://www.dieoff.com which have contain extensive articles and have numerous links to other sites. 'Oilcrisis' deals mostly with oil but 'Dieoff' has articles covering an extensive range of social problems that make fascinating though foreboding reading themselves. (7) For an excellent book on the influence of resources on the history of nations and empires read Geodestinies by Walter Youngquist. It covers the history of a multitude of resources from thousands of years ago to the present and looks ahead at what is in store for mankind

THE COMING DARK AGE Newsletter June, 2003 1. INTRODUCTION Welcome to all the people who recently signed up for the newsletter. This month's edition contains some observations on the current standing of the United States, plus a discussion of the whereabouts of Saddam Hussein. I welcome all comments, suggestions and contributions, especially the latter. Please forward this newsletter to anyone you think might be interested. Marc Widdowson 2. THE UNITED STATES IN WORLD HISTORY - A NEW ROMAN EMPIRE? In the last few years, some commentators have been referring to the United States as a hyperpower. Paul Kennedy, the historian and author of 'The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers', said that he looked back at his data of comparative military investment over the last five hundred years, and found that no previous superpower has achieved such an advantage over its nearest rivals. In his words, "nothing has ever existed like this disparity of power; nothing." President Bush's easy victory over Saddam Hussein seemed to confirm this view. The American government said what it was going to do and then went ahead and did it. Words like 'awesome' were used to describe this display of political and military might. Indeed, America's forces were pulling their punches. Precision bombs delivered enormous firepower but to a limited range of carefully chosen targets. Meanwhile, American ground troops dressed in body armour and driving high technology fighting vehicles operated with near impunity against the rabble-like Iraqi army with its feeble small arms. It was like taking candy from a baby. People talked of the birth of a new world empire. Dark age theorists take a different view. We believe that the commentators have been mistaking high explosive for genuine power and authority. The ability to kill foreigners, even with extreme efficiency, does not in itself constitute greatness as a civilisation. The civilisations of the past have based their prowess on something more than that. If we look at the broader picture, and correct for the general progress of technology, we will find that the United States is less impressive today than it was thirty years ago. What is more, the period of American superpowerdom has come within an overarching historical wave, comprising the rise and fall of what is called western civilisation. America has caught the tail end of that wave. Despite its huge talents and achievements, the world-historical situation has prevented it from gaining as dominant a position as was the lot of some earlier empires. Let us consider some other facts about the United States and American

society. In Missouri recently, the governor ordered every third light bulb in government buildings to be unscrewed in order to save money. This is by no means the only state fending off bankruptcy and resorting to measures more reminiscent of some third world country. Kentucky has had to let prisoners out early, while Oregon is paying teachers less than their full salaries. More than half the states are cutting back their commitments in health, education and social security. The United States has the highest prison population in the world. The numbers have trebled since 1990. The proportion of American citizens in prison is five times the world average-over two million out of a total population of 280 million. That means that roughly two percent of males of working age are behind bars, and twice as many are on probation or otherwise mixed up in the penal system. This is hardly the sign of a healthy society. The year 1992 was the fifth centenary of Christopher Columbus's first voyage to America. The fourth centenary in 1892 had seen extravagant celebrations, with street-namings and statues commemorating the Genoese admiral. A hundred years later, the mood was very different as Columbus was accused of genocide and corruption, and his claim even to have been the first to reach America was called into question. Fierce protests made the city of Denver cancel its Columbus Day parade, previously an annual event, and the parade was not resumed in subsequent years. By contrast, the 150th anniversary of Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto, in 1998, was widely hyped. The New York Times said that the book was an 'enduring masterpiece' and it called Marx-the inspiration behind both Maoism and the failed experiment of the Soviet Union-one of the great thinkers for the twenty first century. Between 1992 and 1994, the United States attempted to restore order in Somalia. The government of this country had collapsed in 1990, when rebels ousted Mohammed Siad Barre. He was a typical African dictator who had ruled Somalia for ten years. Since the rebels did not set up any replacement administration, the country was in anarchy. Rival 'warlords,' i.e. former generals and politicians, were carving out petty fiefdoms with private armies. It was an ugly situation, and the several thousand Marines and Green Berets deployed to Somalia never got on top of it. The Americans soon became the enemy for trying to round up and detain the rebel leaders. Things reached their ugliest on the night of 3-4 October 1993, when two Black Hawk helicopters were brought down by rocket propelled grenades. Before the night was over, there were nineteen American dead and eighty-four wounded. The decision to pull out was made almost immediately. When the last Marines withdrew to their landing craft several months later, they were followed down the beach by a jeering mob. Billed as the world's one remaining superpower, the United States was chased out of Somalia by a bunch of tee-shirt wearing teenagers armed with dusty Kalashnikovs and baseball bats. These observations paint a picture of America which is rather different from that of a self-confident 'hyperpower.' They nevertheless present a true picture of America's current standing in the world and of what the twenty first century will bring. The obvious wealth and power of the

United States, and of western society in general, are based on an illusion because they exist alongside huge problems, which in turn threaten the whole edifice. As my book 'The Coming Dark Age' will show these problems add up to a pattern that has characterised every past society when it was in decline. People may speak of a new American empire, either to praise it or denounce it, but measured against the standards established by history, America's empire is a degraded form of imperialism. This is not an indictment of the United States, merely a reflection of the way that history is running. Furthermore, this pattern of decline is leading towards one of those interruptions in history known as a dark age. The sheer number, magnitude and intractability of our problems makes this conclusion necessary. Future historians will regard the collapse of western civilisation as predestined, for they will recognise in our time the clearest signs of imminent disaster. 3. WHERE IS SADDAM HUSSEIN? The war in Iraq opened at dawn on 20 March with a limited strike by cruise missiles and F-117 Nighthawks against 'a small number of command and control targets.' That meant an attempt to decapitate the regime by blowing up a compound that Saddam Hussein was believed to have just entered. So, at this stage, it was thought that Saddam was still in Baghdad. A second strike took place on 7 April against a restaurant (al-Saah) in the upmarket Mansour district of Baghdad. American agents (spies or special forces) apparently saw Saddam and his son Qusay go into the restaurant or the house next to it, with thirty other officials, for a meeting. A B-1 aircraft was diverted to the area and flattened the restaurant with four bombs. If correct, therefore, Saddam Hussein was still in Baghdad at this stage, which was a few days before the city finally fell. One question is whether Saddam was actually killed in either of these attacks. Supposedly not. He appeared on television shortly after the first raid, and two days after the Mansour raid he turned up outside the Adhamiya mosque in northern Baghdad, where he made a kind of farewell speech to surprised local residents. It was suggested that these appearances could have been by Saddam's well-known doubles. But would they really have bothered, when Saddam was no longer in charge and the war was obviously being lost? Allegedly, MI6 said that Saddam had left the restaurant moments before the raid, while a former chief of protocol for Saddam told the BBC that the Iraqi leader was not even in Baghdad at the time of the strike. General Tommy Franks, coalition forces commander, claimed that he had a sample of Saddam's DNA and that it would be used to test remains found in the Mansour bombing. On 4 June, the Americans went back for another look, saying that previous searches had not been thorough enough. Today (13 June), American officials said that they would be stepping up the search for Saddam, with a new task force of Iraq experts sent over

from the Pentagon. This suggests that they now believe he survived the attempts to kill him, and that they still believe he is in Iraq. Saddam is supposed to have rented five thousand houses around Baghdad that he could use as bolt-holes, moving between them and never staying twice in the same place. Many analysts believe though that he would have quit Baghdad and holed up in his home town of Tikrit, where he would be protected by his most loyal followers. Ahmed Chalabi, the head of the Iraqi National Congress, recently said that Saddam is 'moving in an arc' around the River Tigris, and paying out bounties to those who succeed in killing American soldiers. However, few people believe that Chalabi's claims are objective or trustworthy. It is true that people tend to run for home when they are in real trouble. It is also true that Saddam was quoted as telling foreign visitors before the war that he had been born in Iraq and would die in Iraq. But Saddam is nothing if not an expert survivor, with a massive sense of self-preservation. Would he really hole up in Iraq, especially in Tikrit-the most obvious place-to make a suicidal last stand? In mid-April coalition officials were apparently fairly sure that Saddam was still in Iraq. Some have suggested that he might be living as a nomadic Bedouin out in the desert. Yet the really sensible thing for Saddam would seem to have been to get out of the country altogether, and hole up with friends somewhere that is not crawling with American forces. The ease with which Baghdad fell after the resistance in the southern towns has rightly led people to suspect that a deal was done with Iraqi leaders. They were allowed to escape in return for not putting up a fight. This will never be admitted officially, but it has to be the case. On 5 April, the US sent a patrol right into the heart of Baghdad to test the situation. They were obviously not expecting any resistance. Nevertheless, it is highly unlikely, unthinkable even, that the deal that led to the fall of Baghdad was made with Saddam Hussein. It is more probable that it was made with top army commanders, and the omission of their names from "Iraq's most wanted" has given fuel to that suspicion. Saddam was probably not allowed to flee Iraq, and so it would not have been easy for him to get out during the war. Nevertheless, he could see it coming for a long time. It seems likely that he would have had contingency plans, perhaps developed years beforehand. Indeed, it is almost certain that he had a variety of sophisticated schemes and that one of them was duly implemented. In May, US forces intercepted a lorry containing $500m worth of gold bullion, heading for the Iraqi town of Qaim near the border with Syria. This was said to be a staging post for the escape of top Iraqi officials. It was also announced that Qusay Hussein had turned up at the central bank hours before hostilities started and removed $1bn in various different currencies -- although a significant amount of that was said to have been recovered. How useful would gold bullion and foreign currency be if Saddam were

sitting in Tikrit or a tent in the desert? Not very. It would be much more useful, though, as a present to a foreign leader who happened to accept Saddam as a guest. Where could Saddam go? The most obvious place is Syria, where the bullion was heading. Syria is an ally of Iraq. In the immediate aftermath of the war, America directed some very threatening rhetoric against Syria, so that it seemed as though it might be next on the attack list. This included the accusation that it was sheltering wanted Iraqis, although Saddam was not mentioned by name. The Russians were also suspected as possibly ready to give Saddam shelter. Russia and Iraq had developed friendly relations over the previous decade, when Iraq was under western-imposed sanctions. On 7 April, the same day as the Mansour raid, American troops fired on a convoy that contained Russian diplomats fleeing Baghdad for Syria. A huge amount of disinformation surrounded this attack, which was eventually deemed an 'accident,' but that is not very likely. There are many reasons why the Americans could have wanted to send a warning to the Russians, but one of them is certainly that they might have been aiding Saddam's escape. At any rate, it turned out that he was not aboard the convoy. The rhetoric against the Syrians has now been turned way down. Perhaps this is a sign that Syria has somehow managed to satisfy the US that Saddam is not hiding there. As for Saddam's other neighbours, it is unlikely that he would have been accepted in Iran, Kuwait or Saudi Arabia, countries with whom he had fought. Nor is it likely that he went to Turkey. The latter may not have supported the war, but it was certainly not on Saddam's side. Nevertheless, if Saddam was going anywhere, it would have had to be overland. The Americans had Iraqi airspace and the waters of the Gulf well covered. The Spectator's chess correspondent, Raymond Keene recently suggested that Saddam might be in the autonomous Russian republic of Kalmykia. Its idiosyncratic president, Kirsan Ilumzhinov, who is also president of the international chess federation, seemed to come into a lot of money in the late 90s, which he used to host lavish chess events. This is despite the fact that Kalmykia is poverty-stricken. Kirsan also developed a very close relationship with Saddam Hussein. It seems plausible that the two facts might be related, and that Saddam bought himself a retirement home in Kirsan's fiefdom. The way to Kalmykia from Iraq lies through north-west Iran and Chechnya -- rugged, lawless regions, which Saddam might just have been able to cross unnoticed. In South Africa, meanwhile, rumours abound that Saddam has found refuge in Cape Town. South Africa's president, Thabo Mbeki, was said by the Iraqi ambassador to have been very supportive, along with many other South African politicians. This would be a good hiding place. Far away from the heat in the middle east, and Saddam's wealth would go a long way here. It is difficult to know how Saddam got all the way to Cape Town, but Syria might have served as a staging post. So that is it. Inconclusive. But the US is offering a multi-million reward for information leading to Saddam's arrest. Does anyone have any other ideas?

THE COMING DARK AGE Newsletter July, 2003 1. INTRODUCTION This month's edition contains an explanation of the idea that we are heading for a dark age, dealing with some of the common objections that I tend to encounter, and a description of the 'Dark Ages' of barbarian Europe. Past editions of the newsletter are now available at the following address: http://www.darkage.fsnet.co.uk/Newsletter.htm I welcome all comments, suggestions and contributions, especially the latter. Please forward this newsletter to anyone you think might be interested. Marc Widdowson 2. THE DISAPPEARANCE OF WESTERN CIVILISATION Western civilisation will decline, collapse and disappear. What, am I such a pessimist? No I am a historian. I know what happens. Rome, Athens, pharaonic Egypt, the Mayans of Chichen Itza, you name it-these were all great civilisations in their day. "But Western civilisation is different," you will say. Perhaps it is, but the Romans thought they were different too. Their climate, their legal system, their military organisation-these all seemed to make their domination natural and destined to last forever. "Yes, but our democratic principles, our belief in free enterprise." What of them? In the world's first cities, they elected town councillors, while business enterprises borrowed money and issued shares. "But our high technology, surely that changes everything." Such delusion! Of course we are more advanced than earlier civilisations. That is inevitable. But everything we have done was by standing on their shoulders. Don't think science and technology started with us. It has been a long, continuous development, in which the whole human race took part. The people who built the pyramids did not do so without excellent engineering skills. Pythagoras's theorem was known in Babylon a thousand years before Pythagoras was born. Paper, gunpowder, the magnetic compass-these things that underlay western achievements like printing, exploration and world conquest-all came from China. Today our inventions are being spread round the globe. Anyone could climb on our shoulders. "Yes," you will say, "but this globalisation is something new-the fact that the world is now one." Sorry, that proves nothing. The world has always been one. Did you know that Egyptians were trading with Ireland hundreds of years before even the Ten Commandments were laid down? We communicate much better than our ancestors, but the Romans could have said the same. The world is more connected than it was, and less connected than it will be. All globalisation means is that the world will collapse together. "I can't see our high tech society with TV, computers and so on just collapsing

and disappearing." Of course you can't. As T S Eliot, said, human beings cannot bear too much reality. Consider the NASA managers who launched the space shuttle in spite of many warnings. It cannot happen to us, that is what people always think. You probably wouldn't have believed that people could fly hijacked airliners into the Twin Towers and destroy them. Today, you cannot imagine the demise of our society, because it is a living, breathing reality. But to future historians its collapse will seem completely natural-just as the collapse of Rome and Egypt seems natural to you, now that those civilisations have been reduced to museum curiosities. When civilisations collapse, information is wiped out. Our DVDs and VHS videos will become as mysterious as the hieroglyphs. Even if some genius succeeds in decoding them, most will have been molten or destroyed by centuries of trouble. I am not saying these things because I have some unusual ability to see into the future. It is based on my study of the past. Everything I am predicting for our civilisation has happened to civilisations before, and not once or a few times, but over and over again. "Okay, if what you say is true, well, it's a gloomy prospect, isn't it?" Actually no. That is to look at it in the wrong way. Why should you care about the ending of western civilisation? That will not be the end of our planet. Would you have it that civilisations never came to an end? In that case, you are wishing for Egypt still to dominate the world. No, it is not western civilisation that you should be worrying about, but the human race. Surely it is good that people move on to new and better kinds of society, and that different regions get a chance to pick up the baton of human progress. Our society is fairer and better at meeting human needs than societies of the past. We have abolished slavery, for example. But we are still a long way from perfection. I am not just talking about things like drugs, crime and family breakdown. There is also the ongoing waste of Africa's human and natural resources. Don't think that these are minor issues. They have been getting worse for fifty or a hundred years, and are tied in with the whole logic of our situation. When civilisations collapse, the decades that follow are times of great destruction but also of great creativity. These are the dark ages out of which new civilisations are born. They are like forest fires, which clear out dead wood and allow new life to come through. Of course you fear disruption of the status quo, because it brings you great advantages. But for many citizens of our planet, a dark age can only be an opportunity. In any case, life in declining civilisations or in dark ages has pros and cons just like any other time in history. It is not the times we live in that determine how happy we should be, but what we as individuals make of them. "Okay, so how long have we got? When is this going to happen?" Look around you. It is already happening. These are the signs that have always accompanied failing civilisations: an upsurge in war; ever more laws but crime rising anyway; a growing gap between rich and poor; mushrooming social welfare; people turning away from traditional religion; buildings cramped and using cheaper materials; art bizarre and restless; immigrants growing in numbers and less willing to adapt; fear of new energy sources. I could go on. Civilisations are judged by their

ability to create order and wealth on a global scale, and to win the respect of lesser nations. In these areas, America is doing less well than it was thirty years ago, and the west as a whole has been declining for a hundred years. Stand back. Study history. Stop congratulating yourself. There are big changes ahead. 3. THE EUROPEAN DARK AGES Historians first applied the term 'Dark Ages' to the centuries that lay between the fall of Rome (AD 476) and the flowering of the Middle Ages (AD 1000 onwards). The darkest period of the Dark Ages occurred in Britain between AD 400 and AD 600. This was from the withdrawal of the Roman legions to the arrival of Saint Augustine of Canterbury, the missionary who brought the British church back under the control of the pope. These two centuries encompassed the reign of King Arthur, whom many historians no longer believe to have existed, given the complete lack of tangible evidence. It says something about the darkness of those times that one of its most important figures should leave no trace except some medieval legends. During this period, the Angles and Saxons arrived in Britain. This was a hugely important event, as Britain thereafter became an Anglo-Saxon island, yet virtually every detail is obscure. We know far more about Caesar's visits to Britain than we do about the arrival of these settlers. It is unclear whether they were outright invaders, or whether they were originally invited in. It is also unclear whether they came in a single episode or gradually over many decades. Nor do we know whether the Anglo-Saxons ethnically cleansed the original Britons out of England into Cornwall and Wales, as was once imagined, or whether they mingled with the existing population in a much more benign fashion. The whole thing is a complete mystery. The reason that we are so in the dark about this period is, in the first place, because there are almost no documentary records. There is something called the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, but that was written in later centuries and much of its information is unreliable. The only contemporary record is by a certain monk named Gildas, who wrote a book called On the Ruin of Britain. In this Gildas lamented the destructive behaviour of the 'tyrants,' or petty warlords, whose constant feuding had brought the country to a state of anarchy. As with everything about this period, we are unsure precisely when Gildas lived and we do not know how much of his account might be exaggerated. Another reason for the period's obscurity is that the archaeological record is much sparser than it is for the times either before or afterwards. At one time it was thought that this reflected a dramatic fall in the population, thanks to the turmoil and fighting that Gildas describes. There may have been an element of that. However, the main reason was probably a change from the use of mass-produced durables to home-made items. In Roman times, the British used beakers and cooking utensils made of pottery, often imported from factories in France. In the later period, they turned to leather beakers and wooden bowls, which have not survived so well in the soil. This change seems to imply

a severe breakdown in the economy. The archaeological record is also poor because of a near complete cessation of building work. People abandoned the cities and villas, and that seems to point to a collapse of law and order on top of the economic collapse. They fled to the countryside because large settlements attracted criminals and were unsafe, and urban living became impossible anyway if the shops were going out of business. These were desperate times. Survival was the main concern, and it is only to be expected that educated individuals who could provide us with a written record were few and far between. In its outlines, the Britain of AD 400-600 looks very much like, say, modern Somalia-chaotic and impoverished. Or to put it the other way around, if Somalia's turmoil continues for another two centuries, then its archaeological and written record is likely to be as sparse as that of post-Roman Britain. At any rate, the two centuries that followed Roman rule are a missing chapter in the history of the British isles. They saw the introduction of new races, new culture, new language, and the beginnings of the settlement patterns that have characterised Britain down to the present day. Yet they left no trace of how this happened. It is as though a veil came down, and when it lifted two hundred years later it was to reveal a society utterly transformed. In Spain and France, and to some extent Italy, the dark age came a little later. Here it was the seventh and eighth centuries that were the most obscure. However, this continental dark age was never quite as dark as that of Britain. For a start, we know the names of the kings. Unlike Britain's Arthur, historians have rescued them at least from the realms of mythology. Similarly, on the continent, there was no general abandonment of the cities, although in many cases they shrank dramatically. Trade with Africa and the east Roman empire also seems to have continued on a reasonable scale, although again it was much diminished in comparison with imperial times. Overall, the whole period from the fifth century to the tenth century, in Britain and on the continent, is problematic for historians and archaeologists. While we may be wary of the term 'Dark Ages' as a way of writing off a whole era of European history, the term 'dark age' in a narrower, technical sense seems very logical. Quite simply, a dark age is dark in the sense that we do not know what happened in it. THE COMING DARK AGE Newsletter August, 2003 1. INTRODUCTION This month's edition suggests why we should not worry about the 'end of history', because the coming dark age will lead to the 're-starting' of history. It also contains some observations from a Swedish reader about the problems of welfare in advanced societies, particularly with respect to Sweden.

Past editions of the newsletter are at the following address: http://www.darkage.fsnet.co.uk/Newsletter.htm I welcome all comments, suggestions and contributions, especially the latter. Please forward this newsletter to anyone you think might be interested. Marc Widdowson 2. THE RE-STARTING OF HISTORY Easy victory in Iraq rammed home the extent of American dominance. People talked about the birth of a new world empire. Others saw it as a last-ditch plan to grab the world's oil. According to their way of thinking, the oil is starting to run out, and after that our civilisation is doomed. The optimists and pessimists tend to share one assumption-today's situation is unprecedented. Supposedly, computers, jet airliners and world-wide communications have torn up the historical rule-book. If one looks at long time-scales, though, the situation is not at all unprecedented. Events are actually unfolding in a very familiar way. Our societies face a whole series of intractable problems. --The ability of terrorists and criminals to turn high technology against the forces of law and order. --Mushrooming systems of social welfare that encourage failure but whose perverse incentives cannot be removed without recreating the very cruelties they were designed to eliminate. --The ongoing waste of Africa's human and natural resources as that continent descends in a spiral of insurgency, debt and social decay. --Growing hostility to radical innovation in societies where life is already comfortable enough. The point about these problems is that, while they are new to us, they are also old problems, and absolutely characteristic of failing civilisations. Rome too crippled itself with dole payments to an increasingly idle populace. Rome too saw its technologies-roads and weapons-turned against it by barbarian raiders. When Rome fell, it was not because the barbarians attacked-they had been doing that practically since the day it was founded. It was because Roman civilisation was itself sick and rotten. Equally, our civilisation is not really doomed because the oil will run out. It is doomed because of our lack of resilience and our failure to take things in our stride. After the fall of Rome, Europe descended into the Dark Ages. In Britain, cities were abandoned, commerce disappeared, and warlords roamed the countryside. The next two hundred years are an almost complete blank in Britain's historical record. Yet this was not the first dark age to hit humanity. Such episodes have occurred many times across the world, ever since the founding of the first civilisations five thousand years ago. Dark ages are periods of turmoil and economic collapse, and they can last from decades up to centuries. They are 'dark' in the sense that we

know little of what happened in them. Many people ask what can be done to prevent the dark ages from coming back. That is to misunderstand how history works. Dark ages are never the problem. They are the solution. Dark ages are times of great creativity and transformation. They are like forest fires, which clear out dead wood and allow new growth to come through. There is a deep logic to this. We humans learn from our mistakes. We have to go back in order to go forwards. Fortunes are changing all the time-in the lives of individuals, cities, countries and continents. There are short setbacks and deep, disastrous troughs. Dark ages are just the most extreme events of this perpetual ferment. Today, it can seem natural that civilisations like those of Rome and Egypt are dead and gone. Yet those societies were once vigorous and vital, and they remained highly successful over long periods. Egypt was literate and urbanised when Europe was still at the tribal level. It lived through the bronze and iron ages. The pyramids, which in some ways have never been equalled, were built a thousand years before even the Ten Commandments were laid down. The ancient Egyptians believed that their dominance was inevitable because of the River Nile. The Romans put their prowess down to the Italian climate. These people had no more reason to think that they would decline and disappear than we do. But they did, and so will we. Our civilisation is not uniquely gifted. We have stood on the shoulders of Babylonian mathematicians, Chinese scientists, and medieval Muslim engineers. The modern era has not introduced some decisive new factor. We communicate faster and further than our predecessors, but every century could have said the same. Democracy and free enterprise are not so innovative. Nor is technology relevant, since a society's fate depends on the quality of its human relationships, and these obey certain timeless laws. The true test of a civilisation is its ability to create order and wealth on a global scale, and to win the respect of lesser nations. In these areas, no doubt about it, America is doing less well than it was thirty years ago, and the west as a whole has been declining for a hundred years. The nineteenth century colonial empires produced a civil peace and brought real economic benefits, but American interventions over the last decade have left a trail of anarchy. Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq remain dangerous and unruly places. We should not mistake high explosive for actual power and authority. Nor should we forget the social divisions, indebtedness and high prison populations that show the unhealthy reality behind America's imposing faade. What is more, these problems are linked to some of the things we are most proud of, such as our compassion and our belief in personal liberty. They are genuine impasses, of the kind that only a dark age

can resolve. So indeed, we are heading for a dark age. Yet the ending of a civilisation is not the end of the world. Humanity will resurface, and with a renewed willingness to bear hardship, delay gratification and sacrifice the individual for the good of the whole. Combine such attitudes with continuing advances in nuclear and space technologies, and one has the recipe for a fantastic new era of human progress. Make no mistake. History is a continuously unfolding saga and we are just at the latest point of it. 3. PROBLEMS OF THE WELFARE STATE **Problems Related To Swedish Welfare** 1 Lack of well-being at work (work related stress costs Swedish society about Euro 20 billion a year, out of about Euro 250 billion in GDP) 2 High level of early retirement pension and sick leave (we lose 800.000 people in work due to early retirement pension related to 4.200.000 people in work) 3 High degree of ill-health (sleep problems, neck and back problems, overweight, etc) 4 Problems with human relationships (50% divorce rate, children problems, etc) 3:5 High consumption of pharmaceuticals (Swedes consume pharmaceuticals for $350 a year per capita in average!) 6 Overloaded medical service (long queues, impossible to meet demand) 7 Extensive bureaucracy (corresponds to a full library with only laws, forms etc that grows every year) 8 Problems in schools (near anarchy) 9 Future lack of labour (increased burden) 10 Bad business climate (20.000 pages of law text for businesses, inferior support, low invention) 11 High unemployment (direct and indirect unemployment) 12 High criminality (extremely high costs and reduced quality of life) 13 High taxes (in relation to output) 14 Increasing wage differentiation (inequality, reduced consumption, poverty) 15 Low building activity of houses and apartments (low R&D and high prices) 16 Low R&D within alternative energy (nearly non-existing) 17 Low political interest (who cares!) **Reasons For Welfare Problems In Sweden (some of them)** 1 Maslow (self-actualisation which means, among others, that time at work must be fun and interesting not only provide money, situation today provoke internal stress) 2 Material well-being has reached low marginal benefits. Confused as many are they still consume more to try satisfying their "needs" 3 Global uncertainties, wars, attacks, poverty and continuous flow of bad news creates internal stress

4 Moral scandals by business executives, politicians etc decrease moral values and increase greediness, which is seen in society in all sorts of "abuse" 5 The quarter economy means that businesses give priority to fast profits, but forget long term development and inventions. This has serious implications on many levels 6- Short mandate periods for politicians, low moral and knowledge, and priority to attract voters makes them short-sighted with populist solutions **General Discussion And Conclusions** 1 The use of GNP is totally out of date. We must instead use an index measuring quality of life. The Swedish national bureau of statistics already provides ample variables. 2 The welfare problems are interrelated and substantial improvements cannot be realised without tackling several of the problems simultaneously (structure problem) 3 There is ample scope for transferring costs related to welfare problems to preventive activities, e.g. from the medical and pharmaceutical sector to health related activities, from costs related to criminality, insurance, surveillance to school sector, from problems with moral, lack of empathy, greediness to perennial activities on television, communicating good values (Swedish TV has used this opportunity for a long time concerning warnings for drunkenness when driving, sexual carefulness, winter driving, etc). This way of transferring the values of the government is already an ongoing activity but must be substantially extended. I fully believe that communicating good values are the only way of reducing problems with low moral, greediness, stress, and lack of empathy in the long run. The process starts at day-care centre and is a life long activity. 4 Consequently, I believe there is room for a substantial increase in quality of life without increasing taxes or other financial burdens. 5 When analysing some of the proposals and actual activities of the government it is easy to understand their complete inability to handle the welfare problems. They will implement minor changes but the welfare problem will remain and grow worse. Reduction of sickness benefits will temporary decrease costs but the quality of life will continuously deteriorate. THE COMING DARK AGE Newsletter September, 2003 1. INTRODUCTION In response to reader request, this month's edition looks at military applications of I-O-C, which is the sociological model that underpins dark age theory. It also provides a survey of dark ages throughout history and around the world. This follows on from the July edition of the newsletter, which included a piece specifically on Europe's

post-Roman dark age. Past editions of the newsletter are at the following address: http://www.darkage.fsnet.co.uk/Newsletter.htm I welcome all comments, suggestions and contributions, especially the latter. Please forward this newsletter to anyone you think might be interested. Marc Widdowson 2. MILITARY APPLICATIONS OF I-O-C I-O-C stands for Integration-Organisation-Cohesion, and these represent the three distinct spheres of human interaction. In essence, integration refers to the political side of life, organisation to the economic, and cohesion to the social-cultural. That is to say, taking the political first, if a society has strong leaders who are effective at imposing their authority on the other members of the society, then the society is said to be highly integrated or to possess a high degree of integration. High integration is associated with certain characteristic features, such as peace and order. Low integration is associated with the opposite. On the economic side, if the members of a society are divided into numerous specialist occupations who trade vigorously with each other, the society is said to be highly organised or to possess a high degree of organisation. IMPORTANT NOTE: When we say that the society is 'organised' we don't mean that someone in particular has come along and organised it-organisation is an overall property of the society resulting from the micro-interactions of its individual members. High organisation is associated with things like wealth and a high rate of innovation, while low organisation (corresponding to self-sufficiency and lack of economic diversity) is associated with poverty and technological stagnation. Finally, on the social-cultural side, if the members of a society share a common set of values and are intensely loyal to the society, the society is said to be highly cohesive or to possess a high degree of cohesion. All this is of interest to dark age theory because a dark age can then be defined as a time of extremely low integration, organisation and cohesion, and the whole drama of history can be abstracted as the saga of fluctuations in integration, organisation and cohesion. Dark age theory goes further into the interactions between integration, organisation and cohesion, and how and why they tend to fluctuate, but I won't discuss that here. Instead, I am going to talk about military applications of I-O-C, based on my experience of consulting to the UK MOD. Most obviously, I-O-C can be used to structure intelligence assessments of particular countries. It is useful to know where a nation fares in the integration-organisation-cohesion stakes for two reasons. Firstly, it gives an indication of that society's historical trajectory. If you look at how a country's I-O-C has been changing in the recent past, and you know where the I-O-C is now, then, with an understanding of the dynamic behaviour of integration, organisation and cohesion, you can have some idea of the kinds of issue that that society will have to

face in the years ahead. In other words you gain an insight into such things as its foreign policy agenda, and its economic and diplomatic performance. Secondly, I-O-C gives you an appreciation of a society's strengths and weaknesses, and that is important information if it is your enemy (or indeed your ally), and again with I-O-C theory you have some insight into the best areas to target say as part of a psyops (psychological operations) campaign. The advantage of I-O-C over existing methods is that it is largely formal and objective, and furthermore it is rooted in five thousand years of historical experience. This is all I will say on that subject. A quite different area where I-O-C can be applied to the military is in assessing the readiness states of one's own armed forces. At its most abstract, I-O-C is a measure of collective performance. In dark age theory, one could say that I-O-C is used to describe the collective performance of say the Roman Empire-when the Roman Empire had high I-O-C scores, it was at its peak; when I-O-C diminished, the Empire declined and disappeared, or in other words the Roman collective performance faltered. Translating the I-O-C concepts into issues more familiar from the military context, one can say firstly that integration is about the commander's ability to impose a common intent on his force. If the commander is effective at formulating and disseminating a common intent, via the planning/orders cycle, then one can say that the formation is well integrated. If he does not succeed in imposing a common intent, the formation will be considered poorly integrated. Secondly, organisation is about the division of labour within the formation or military team. In a well organised formation, there are various specialists occupying different roles-e.g. fighter/bomber, artillery/infantry, or ops officer/logs officer-and they function together in a complementary manner with no gaps, overlaps, bottlenecks or underutilisation. In a poorly organised team, by contrast, the individuals are jacks of all trades, relying on themselves, doing many tasks and not being very good at any of them. Thirdly, cohesion refers to the level of commitment and loyalty that individual members show towards the team. Obviously, integration, organisation and cohesion measure things that are pertinent to collective performance. A team characterised by a common intent, an efficient division of labour and a high degree of loyalty and commitment will, in general, prove more operationally effective than one that does not have these things. Having said this, I-O-C is not the only thing bearing on operational effectiveness. Individual performance-such as the ability to shoot straight or to devise tactically appropriate plans-is also relevant. However, I-O-C offers a clear and precise way of capturing the phenomenon of teamwork or collective performance, which has traditionally been regarded as largely intangible and unquantifiable, in contrast to individual performance. The above then has explained how, in general terms, I-O-C is relevant to assessing military readiness. The crucial question is how you actually measure the I-O-C of a military formation and what you can do with the information. I can't go into full details here, but to give

the flavour of it take the example of integration. Integration measures the extent to which the commander imposes a common intent on the force. Integration can therefore be defined differently as the probability that the activity of any given element of the formation lies within the commander's intent. In fact, you don't need to look at the element's activity continuously, but only at changes in the element's behaviour, which occur at decision points. Integration therefore becomes the probability that any given decision reflects the commander's intent. In practice, it is impossible to monitor every single decision, and therefore you sample a small set of decisions, assuming them to be representative of the whole. Then if you find, say, that 80 percent of the decisions within your sample reflect the commander's intent, this implies that the formation has an integration of 80 percent. That is the basis of it. A similar approach is used for organisation and cohesion. With this method of measuring a formation's I-O-C, one can look, for example, at the improvement in collective performance that comes from training and exercising. This makes it possible to start answering long-standing questions about how much benefit the military gets from formation-level training, in contrast to other ways of investing its money, such as buying more tanks. To do that, it is necessary to know what performance improvement comes from having a given level of integration, organisation and cohesion. Again, I cannot go into great detail here, but the flavour of it, again with respect to integration as an example, is as follows. If the team is integrated, with all the elements working to a common purpose, the capabilities of the different elements reinforce each other-e.g. the artillery provides indirect fire on obstacles created by the engineers, in order to give the enemy a very difficult time. If the elements are working to different purposes, so that say the fire plan is unrelated to the engineer plan, then these capabilities do not reinforce and may even cancel each other out, thus giving the enemy a much easier time. In short, integration increases the degree to which the formation's capabilities will reinforce each other and hence the probability of mission success against a given enemy. These ideas can be incorporated into operational analysis models so as to predict performance and also to conduct balance of investment analyses. 3. DARK AGES-A RECURRENT AND GLOBAL PHENOMENON Europe's post-Roman dark age is not unique. I will show that dark ages have occurred throughout history and all across the world, but first let us briefly take some historical bearings. Traditionally, Rome is supposed to have been founded in 753 BC, though it was not until 400-300 BC that it began to emerge as a significant force in the Italian peninsula. In this respect, it was a relative latecomer. For the civilisation of pharaonic Egypt was founded in 3100 BC, and the world's first ever cities were founded several hundred years before that in Iraq. Egypt was united under a single central government, but Iraq was

characterised by a number of independent states joined together in a federal structure. The latter region, which extended into Syria, is sometimes called Mesopotamia. This traditional name, meaning 'between-the-rivers', is based on the fact that the lands where this civilisation flourished lay between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates. I prefer to use the countries' modern names. The first dark age known to history occurred in Egypt around 2200 BC. It is known as the first intermediate period and lasted about 25 to 50 years. It is a dark age because its history is very confused and there are few records from the time. No new palaces or temples were built. There were repeated famines. Trade dwindled. The texts that we do have describe every kind of social disruption. Peasants had to carry weapons when they worked in the fields. There was a rapid turnover of pharaohs, with each one reigning barely longer than a year. At the same time, the wealth and power of the pharaohs declined, and in the provinces various individuals set themselves up as independent rulers who fought among themselves. This picture that we have of Egypt's first intermediate period is therefore very similar to the one we have of Britain's post-Roman dark age-i.e. economic breakdown and political disorder, along with a marked reduction in historical and archaeological remains. Egypt experienced a second intermediate period around 1700 BC, which was again characterised by civil unrest, problems with the food supply, and general confusion and obscurity. During this dark age, which lasted one or two centuries, Egypt was invaded by a people referred to as the Hyksos. Just like the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain, this was a highly significant but highly mysterious episode. We do not really have any idea as to who the Hyksos were, where they came from, what they did, or where they went. Finally, around 1100 BC, Egypt entered a third intermediate period. This was not quite so dark as the earlier dark ages, but it lasted on and off for some four hundred years, with some periods being darker than the rest. During this era, parts of the kingdom occasionally broke away under rival dynasties and sharp rises in food prices show that there were problems with the economy. These Egyptian dark ages had counterparts among other ancient societies. In particular, the Egyptian first intermediate period was part of a much wider dark age affecting the whole of the middle east. At this time, the cities of Syria and Iraq were at war among themselves and were also being plundered by barbarian outsiders. The region's archaeological record becomes very thin, and building, writing and art all seem to have ceased. The third intermediate period coincided with similar retrenchment not only in the middle east but also among the civilised societies that had now sprung up around the shores of the Mediterranean, i.e. among the Hittites and Mycenaeans. The first of these people were based in what is now Turkey. The Hittites had risen to prominence from about 1800 BC onwards, when they began to conquer the lands to their south. Around 1500 BC, they had experienced a peculiar dark age of their own, lasting about fifty years. During that time, the empire broke up but it was

later restored under new kings. The dark age that began in 1100 BC, i.e. at the same time as Egypt's third intermediate period, completely wiped out Hittite civilisation in its Turkish heartland. A few centuries later, though, a new society of people calling themselves Hittites emerged in Syria. These are the Hittites mentioned in the Bible. The Mycenaean civilisation was based in Greece. It is named for its most important city at Mycenae. These Mycenaean Greeks are the ones who are supposed to have fought the Trojan war described by Homer. Around the time of the Egyptian third intermediate period, their civilisation collapsed and disappeared. The details are vague, but the ruined palaces of Mycenae show evidence of burning, and therefore of violent disorder. Greece's ensuing dark age is one of the darkest in history and lasted four hundred years. Later Greek myths refer to it as a time of warrior heroes, suggesting that it was characterised by the usual warlordism. Writing and urbanism vanished from the peninsula, while archaeology has little to tell us. The people who founded Greece's classical civilisation, with its heroes like Socrates and Aristotle, were not related to their Mycenaean predecessors. The classical Greeks arrived during the dark age as part of something called the Dorian migration. Again like the Anglo-Saxons in Britain, they came to their new land in a mysterious manner. Around 800 BC they began to pull Greece out of the dark age, and by 500 BC the classical city states, such as Sparta, Athens and Corinth, were fully flourishing. Arguably, Rome could be said to have risen out of a dark age that previously existed on the Italian peninsula. Thus, the main power in northern and central Italy before Rome belonged to the Etruscan people. Their origin is obscure, but the Etruscans are believed to have migrated from the east. Their civilisation began to emerge about 1000 BC, and was in full flower by 800 to 700 BC. The Etruscans' wealth was based on mining and maritime trade, and for a time they were a significant naval power. Then, around the end of the sixth century BC, Etruria went into decline. This is shown by a drastic reduction in archaeological remains. Etruscan tombs, which had once been lavishly decorated, became poorer and meaner, and there were far fewer of them. These so-called Italic middle ages lasted for some 150 years, i.e. until about 350 BC. Etruscan architecture then picked up again and prosperity returned. However, Rome was now also growing in strength, and its destiny was to conquer and absorb the Etruscan civilisation, which it did in 89 BC. I will finish this survey of dark ages by turning further afield, to the examples of China and ancient America. In China, civilisation is traditionally said to have begun around 1600 BC with the rise of the Shang dynasty. By 1000 BC, this gave way to the Chou dynasty, one of the high spots of Chinese history. Yet by 750 BC, the Chou dynasty was in decline, and China entered what are known as its Spring-Autumn and Warring States periods. These constitute a long-five hundred years-though not particularly deep dark age. The country was fragmented into petty tyrannies, which were forever at war,

and the course of events is difficult to unravel. In 221 BC, a new dynasty, that of the Ch'in, reunited and pacified China. However, over the next thousand years or so, the country experienced a series of short dark ages, sometimes known as the first, second and third partitions. These began in AD 221, c. AD 350 and AD 906, respectively. The first and third lasted about fifty years each. The middle one lasted much longer at a little over two hundred years. None of these dark ages was as severe as those of say post-Roman Britain or post-Mycenaean Greece. Nevertheless, in each case, the central state lost control and the countryside dissolved into continuous fighting. In pre-Columbian America, the same pattern emerges. The Aztecs of Mexico and the Incas of Chile/Peru-i.e. the peoples who were in the ascendant when the conquistadors arrived-were just the latest of a series of societies in their respective regions. They had each arisen out of earlier dark ages. In South America, there was initially a flourishing civilisation based on the cities of Huari and Tiahuanaco. Around AD 1000 these cities were abandoned, and it was not until two hundred years later that a new civilisation, the Chimu empire, arose in the same region. Between the fall of Huari-Tiahuanaco and the rise of the Chimu, the archaeological trail goes cold. In other words, it is a dark age. The Chimu empire was conquered by the Incas around 1450. In the Valley of Mexico, the city of Teotihuacan was the dominant power around AD 900. Yet for some reason this city was abandoned and, as had happened in South America, there then followed a two century dark age. It was during this dark age that the Aztecs first migrated to the valley, in a shadowy process that reminds us yet again of the Anglo-Saxons' arrival in Britain. In North America, the first Europeans did not discover any extant civilisation. However, they did discover the remains of one. These were the 'Indian mounds' of the Mississippi region, which for a long time explorers could not believe were the work of the rather primitive local inhabitants. It is now known that there had been a more advanced culture in the Mississippian region, which collapsed some fifty years before Columbus's first voyage. In effect, this part of North America was in a dark age when Europeans arrived. There had been another society, that of the Hopewell culture, which had existed in the same region somewhat earlier and had been at the centre of trade routes reaching across the south-eastern United States. The Hopewell culture had also constructed earthworks and shared other features with the later Mississippian society. However, the Hopewell culture, which arose around 100 BC, died out around AD 400, but the Mississippian culture did not arise until AD 700. Between the two lies a three hundred year dark age. Dark ages then constitute a genuine phenomenon, one that has occurred repeatedly through history. They are characterised above all by their obscurity. During such periods, the historical record goes almost completely silent. There are few contemporary inscriptions or documents, and not much in the way of building or other material

remains. Dark ages are missing chapters in the human story. This obscurity is connected to the fact that dark ages are times of trouble, conflict and warlordism. At the same time commerce dwindles and may die out altogether. These things evidently go hand in hand. It is difficult to run a business amidst widespread fighting. The people who live under such conditions also have more pressing concerns than building monuments and producing written accounts of their times. THE COMING DARK AGE Newsletter October, 2003 1. INTRODUCTION This month's edition discusses the future for Africa, in the light of the phoenix principle and the rise and fall of civilisations. It also deals with one of the common objections to dark age theory, which is that a true dark age could never come again because of the abundance and sophistication of modern information technology. Past editions of the newsletter are at the following address: http://www.darkage.fsnet.co.uk/Newsletter.htm I welcome all comments, suggestions and contributions, especially the latter. Please forward this newsletter to anyone you think might be interested. Marc Widdowson 2. IS THE SITUATION FOR AFRICA HOPELESS? One only needs to be faintly acquainted with the facts of history to know that civilisations rise and fall. Therefore, it is not too difficult to persuade people that, in principle, our own civilisation may suffer the same fate. However, I like to emphasise what this means by saying that the world could one day be dominated by a new civilisation coming out of Africa. For most people, that is an idea too far. They feel that Africans have never displayed any aptitude for civilisation, and that the continent's climate and geography are unfavourable. They also seem to think that technology and the general shape of society have evolved to a point that makes major upheavals a thing of the past. Supposedly, today's dominant countries have shown special scientific and other talents, and as such can never be overtaken. The ironic thing is that previous civilisations and empires were equally convinced that they had cracked the secret of success and would remain permanently at the top of the world. The ancient Egyptians, for example, did not think of themselves as the ancient Egyptians. They thought of themselves as the most culturally advanced, technologically sophisticated society that history had ever seen, and that is what they were. If anything, they were more justified in thinking their advantages would go on forever than we are. The civilisation of pharaonic Egypt lasted for three thousand years, longer than any subsequent civilisation. For almost all of that time,

north-western Europe was a backward region where people had not advanced beyond the village level. The Egyptians must have imagined that they had got so far ahead of the curve that Europe would never catch up. Pharaonic Egypt was a vigorous, dynamic society that adapted successfully to the bronze and iron age revolutions. There is no intrinsic reason why the people who built pyramids and discovered the fundamentals of astronomy, when they were still in the stone age, could not have gone on evolving and been the ones who today invented computers and landed on the moon. Yet that is not what happened and instead the baton of progress moved on towards Europe and from there to America. Today Egypt is among the world's poorest nations. Its literacy rate is below that of Papua New Guinea, so that one of the first countries in the world to have writing now lags behind a country where it was only introduced in the last hundred years. It might be possible to dismiss Egypt's fate if it were not for the fact that the same thing has happened over and over again all across the world. The entire history of humanity has been one of changing fortunes. It is not even as though this shows any sign of calming down. It is only a century since Britain was the head of a global empire, and only fifteen years since the Soviet Union fell apart. To think that the world has suddenly frozen in its current configuration with no more ups and downs goes against all logic and experience. The things that supposedly make us different from the civilisations of the past, such as globalisation and the pace of technological change, are merely quantitative, not qualitative changes. We communicate better than our ancestors did, we know more, there are more of us, and inventions are coming on more quickly. But there is nothing new in all that. People could have said the same at any time in history. Our descendants will no doubt say the same with regard to us. Similarly, we may be impressed by the technologies and social institutions that we see around us. Yet it is not ourselves we have to congratulate for these achievements, but rather all the people who went before us and who made the modern world possible. The reality is that the present is a very ordinary time in history, and our civilisation is in no way especially distinguished. Contrary to popular belief, civilisations do not decline and fall because of sudden disasters like barbarian invasions, climate change, or running out of a vital resource. On the contrary, it is a matter of complex political, economic and social processes that take centuries to develop and play themselves out. There is an inevitability to it, in that powerful and wealthy societies do things that undermine their own wealth and power. For example, they allow their technological secrets to leak away to lesser societies, which initially seem too harmless to worry about. They also rest on their laurels, preferring a comfortable life to the sacrifices and dislocations that are needed for great leaps forward. At first, sheer momentum can keep a civilisation expanding successfully, even as the seeds of its downfall are being sown. Eventually, though, logic catches up, and all civilisations then succumb in much the same way. Laws flow from the centre at an amazing rate, but fail to stem the tide of disorder. There are increasingly frequent wars with barbarian nations who no longer respect the

civilisation's authority. Tax burdens grow, to support an expanding body of parasites, and many people give up or evade their obligations. The gap between rich and poor gets wider. A sense of duty is replaced by selfishness. People turn away from the traditional religion that held society together and embrace a whole range of new cults. The flow of radical inventions and scientific discoveries dries up. Such problems become so numerous and so interrelated that, in the end, the civilisation simply crumbles under the weight of them. It then leaves a great vacuum, into which other nations, ones that previously seemed marginal and inferior, are able to expand. Today, it is not hard to see that this pattern of events is repeating itself. The world is changing as it always has done, and the more time goes by the bigger the changes there will be. That is why I am sure that, in the long run, even Africa will get its chance to lead the human race.

3. DARK AGES-A RECURRENT AND GLOBAL PHENOMENON Although dark ages have happened many times before, I find that many people do not really believe they could not happen again. They point to special features of our own time that make the situation very different. One of these is our advanced technology. How could a dark age happen, it is asked, when we have computers and video cameras, and television presenting the nightly news? Surely these will leave an excellent record of our times. Another alleged special feature of our time is the rapid pace of change. It is said that technological development has really taken off and is unstoppable, so that the kind of dramatic reversal that would be needed to go into a dark age is quite impossible to think of. Similarly, there is the fact that the world is now so connected. Nowhere, it is thought, can really drop out of sight into a dark age when you have global telecommunications and international jet travel, not to mention satellites and manned spacecraft orbiting the earth. In general, people think that there will never be another dark age because western civilisation is simply so accomplished. Its supremacy, so people imagine, is unlike the supremacy of say the Roman empire because it is based on real innovations like liberal democracy and the free market. As Francis Fukuyama argues, this is modernity-a new deal for the human race, which frees us from the gyrations of the past. Supposedly, the only issue remaining for humanity is for the less progressive regions, like China and the Islamic world, to catch us up. These arguments are superficially plausible. Yet the more I look into history, the less satisfactory I find them. The assumptions that they involve are so ingrained that it will take more than this newsletter to knock them down, but I will make a start on the task. The fact is that Somalia, right now, in the twenty first century, is already in a kind of dark age. Who knows what is really going on there, where it is too dangerous for outsiders to travel? Does it even have a history over the last ten years? The anarchy on the ground, the fragmentation of its society, means that there are no significant

events to be recorded. Daily life in Somalia now operates below the threshold of historical observability. Dark ages, then, can still happen. Even in today's connected, technological world, countries can fall out of sight. The fact that western countries retain their information and communications technologies does not in itself prevent them from moving in the same direction. Recording information is not a once-and-for-all process. Things can go backwards. Information can be destroyed and information technologies may be abandoned or forgotten. A common feature of many dead civilisations is that the secret of their writing has been lost. The hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt, for example, had fallen out of use by Roman times. No one could read them any longer. Much of the knowledge and history of pharaonic civilisation had been absorbed into the learning of Graeco-Roman scholars, so that it was not entirely lost. Nevertheless, this would mean that we heard reports of the Egyptians but not the Egyptians themselves. In this case, the secret was rediscovered, when Napoleon invaded Egypt in 1798. For he took with him a group of scientists and historians whose task was to research Egypt's ancient wisdom. Their biggest breakthrough came by chance. French military engineers, building fortifications near the coastal town of Rosetta, dug up a slab of black basalt that carried the same inscription in both Greek and hieroglyphs (as well as demotic, a simplified form of hieroglyphs). Rubbings of the stone were sent back to Paris, where J F Champollion and other French linguists, decoded the hieroglyphs by comparing them with the Greek. That makes it sound easy. The task actually took over twenty years. Several other once forgotten scripts, such as those of ancient Iraq and of the Hittites, have also been rediscovered in the last two hundred years. However, there are many others that remain undeciphered. The writing of the Etruscans is one example, although a small amount of progress has been made on it in recent years. Another example of an undeciphered script is that of the Harappan civilisation. This was a civilisation located along Pakistan's River Indus. It lasted from about 2500 BC to 1500 BC and so was partly contemporary with pharaonic Egypt. It is named after Harappa, one of its two great cities, the other being Mohenjo-Daro. After the Harappan civilisation collapsed, there were no more cities in the area of India and Pakistan for another thousand years. The Harappan script is known only from short inscriptions, and the lack of an extended text makes it very difficult to get a feel for the structure of the language, let alone attempt a translation. As a result, most of the details of Harappan history and society are completely mysterious. The secretive atmosphere is reinforced by Harappan architecture, which is based on grids of uniform houses with massive walls and no external windows, and by the lack of obvious cultural change in its thousand-year existence. All this adds up to the impression of a forbidding, perhaps Orwellian civilisation. Our own records may not be so sure of transmitting the memory of our times to future generations as we fondly imagine. The hieroglyphs were at least inscribed on stone and for the most part have remained as

legible as the day they were written. By contrast, today's documents are inscribed on materials such as magnetic tape or compact disc, whose durability is considerably less assured. Floppy disks of just a few years old are likely to be corrupted. CDs are built to last about thirty years, but will eventually de-laminate, destroying the data they contain. As for earlier recording formats, acetate, which preceded magnetic tape, is already unplayable, while the vinyl of old LPs is beginning to deteriorate. In colour photographs of the sixties and seventies, the dyes are breaking down, giving us purple grass and red sky. Eventually the image is just going to fade away. It will fare less well than the black and white photographs of the nineteenth century. Hollywood films suffer from the same problem, and earlier movies are spontaneously combusting as chemical changes in the film make them explosively unstable. Digital technology has exacerbated the situation, as information today has a short lifecycle. Old floppy disks, often unlabelled, get lost in drawers and on top of bookcases, and are thrown out one by one. Important documents are preserved on the computer's hard disk for a few years, but their relevance steadily declines. Similarly, digital photographs languish in some obscure directory, and are more ephemeral than the old snap. Eventually the computer is replaced, and much of this stuff is left behind. Recordings on audio and video cassettes can be relatively stable, but physical survival is not the only issue. As with the hieroglyphs, it is a question of remembering how to interpret the information. When hardware changes and software is upgraded, older formats become unreadable. Computer punch cards and data tapes, for example, are long out of fashion. New machines are coming out without floppy disk drives, as their minuscule capacity is seen to be worthless for today's programs. Some retro-computing clubs are keeping old hardware going, but the difficulty of replacing or repairing obsolete components will eventually become prohibitive. These machines are unlikely to last for hundreds of years, and a dark age could see them simply trashed. To be set against this is the sheer quantity of material that our societies produce. If even a small amount gets through that will still be a lot. A dark age might leave the VHS video format and the recordings on DVDs as mysterious as the hieroglyphs, but there could be future Champollions who succeed in deciphering them by sheer scholarship and ingenuity. Nevertheless, a given piece of digital data might not be a document but could be an image, a musical recording, or a computer program. In comparison with interpreting ancient texts, deciphering such information will be on a higher plane of difficulty. THE COMING DARK AGE Newsletter November, 2003 1. INTRODUCTION This month's edition contains a review of Stephen Blaha's book "The Lifecycle

of Civilizations". Past editions of the newsletter are at the following address: http://www.darkage.fsnet.co.uk/Newsletter.htm I welcome all comments, suggestions and contributions, especially the latter. Please forward this newsletter to anyone you think might be interested. Marc Widdowson P.S. Sorry for the multiple copies of the last newsletter. Internet problems meant I wasn't sure whether the button press (to send the newsletter) had been registered, and so I tried it several times. As you found out, the button presses were being registered after all! 2. REVIEW: THE LIFECYCLE OF CIVILIZATIONS BY STEPHEN BLAHA This is a very interesting book and it has some important lessons for us, but overall I don't think it represents the right route to a formal theory of history. Of course, you have to start somewhere and I don't want to detract from the author's achievement. He is obviously very intelligent, and his mathematical approach is ingenious. Blaha's starting point is the theory of civilisations which Arnold Toynbee (1889-1975) described in his mammoth work "A Study of History". The main theoretical ideas that Blaha extracts from there are the notion that civilisations typically last 1000 years, and Toynbee's crucial observation that civilisations exhibit a "three-and-a-half-beat" pattern. According to Toynbee, civilisations go through three-and-a-half down-up cycles (or rout-rally cycles as Toynbee has it). The general pattern is for the civilisation to go through an initial growth phase, then to experience a 'breakdown' leading to rout-rally-rout-rally-rout-rally-and-final-rout. Blaha recognises in this the pattern of a damped harmonic oscillator. He therefore suggests certain considerations about resistance to cultural change which lead to the equation for a damped harmonic oscillator. He then adjusts the parameters in his theory to ensure that they lead to 3.5 beats before the oscillation dies out, and to ensure that the overall time from start of the initial growth phase to the last oscillation is 1000 years. Much of the rest of the book involves applying this pattern in various ways. He shows how it fits the known events of historic civilisations. He also speculates about extraterrestrial civilisations that might have different values for the parameters and also what would happen if a change in human lifespan led to older, more conservative populations which would be more resistant to culture change (thus increasing the amount of damping on the harmonic oscillator). Once the initial theory has been established, the book gets a bit repetitive. Nevertheless, his approach offers considerable food for thought, and there are several areas in which one can see that it is ripe for development. What oscillates in Blaha's theory is something he calls 'societal level'. He never really defines this but when he gets close to doing so, in a rather handwaving manner, it seems to be a measure of something like the mood of the civilisation, which swings from optimism to pessimism. He explicitly denies that it represents anything like power or wealth, let alone population size or territorial area. Blaha's theory therefore has only one variable (plus time), and this

apparently corresponds to something a bit like the dark age theory concept of 'social cohesion'. This is the most fundamental criticism of Blaha's approach. It has been recognised for several centuries that human societies are actually described by THREE key variables, i.e. the political, economic and social. Maybe, as a first approximation, you can condense these into one variable, but in the long run you will never properly understand the dynamic of society unless you recognise the separate existence of all three societal dimensions. The vagueness with which Blaha defines societal level means that he has a lot of leeway in fitting historic events to the curve. This is another criticism of his approach. It is too easy to stretch the facts to fit the theory, i.e. in deciding what facts to quote and how to interpret them. For example, a great defeat for a civilisation can be placed at the crest of the wave (on the basis that the crushing defeat marks the beginning of the downwave) or it can be placed in the trough of the wave (on the basis that the crushing defeat is indicative of how low the civilisation has sunk). Blaha does both in order to suit different circumstances. He is also selective. For example, he mentions the Gothic victory over Rome at the battle of Adrianople (AD 378) because it comes at the beginning of what his graph suggests should be a down-wave for the Roman empire. But he conveniently overlooks the disaster of Cannae (216 BC), which would come in the middle of what his graph shows to be an up-wave. Blaha says that historic events seem to fit the curve 'extraordinarily well', but this is not surprising because it is arguable what the curve actually represents and Blaha changes his interpretation from diagram to diagram. For example, when he discusses the interaction of an extraterrestrial civilisation with an earth civilisation, he seems to treat societal level as indicative not of mood but of something like technological sophistication (i.e. the alien civilisation is said to be at a higher societal level just because it has a higher technology). Despite my criticisms, I strongly recommend this book to anyone interested like me in theoretical models of history. It should stimulate ideas and drive us on to develop improved theories. THE COMING DARK AGE Newsletter December, 2003 1. INTRODUCTION Happy new year to all readers. This month's edition describes a problem in dark age theory, which is intended as a challenge for readers with mathematical skills. Past editions of the newsletter are at the following address: http://www.darkage.fsnet.co.uk/Newsletter.htm I welcome all comments, suggestions and contributions, especially the latter. Please forward this newsletter to anyone you think might be interested. Marc Widdowson 2. PROBLEMS IN DARK AGE THEORY #1 - SELF-COUNTERVAILING FUNCTIONS

Dark age theory recognises three key variables, corresponding to the political, economic and social sides of life. These are referred to as (political) integration, (economic) organisation and (social) cohesion. For example, historians writing about past civilisations frequently note that, when the given civilisation is in decline, it DISINTEGRATES into multiple independent regions. We can therefore say that a civilisation which is on the way up experiences integration (bringing previously separate regions into one large political entity, such as the Roman empire), while a civilisation which is on the way down experiences disintegration (splitting up again into many smaller political entities). So we may recognise a great civilisation by its high level of integration, and we may recognise dark ages by their almost total disintegration. It follows that we can tell whether our own civilisation is moving towards or away from a dark age simply by asking whether it is tending to become more or less integrated. Similar comments apply for the concepts of organisation and cohesion. Dark age theory suggests that integration, organisation and cohesion affect each other. However, this occurs in a complex way, so that the three variables never settle down but are continually fluctuating up and down. It is this continual fluctuation that we recognise as the ups and downs of history. E Lorenz analysed a similar situation when he was studying models of the earth's weather systems in the 1960s. He modelled the atmosphere in terms of three variables (representing things like pressure, temperature and density) and he produced a set of equations describing how the rate of change of each variable depended on the current values of the three variables. He found that these equations generated the kind of fluctuation now referred to as 'chaos', where the three variables neither reached equilibrium nor oscillated smoothly but moved up and down in a very irregular manner. Of course, this is very much what the weather actually does and that is why it is so unpredictable. Returning to history, we should have a similar chaotic dynamic among the three variables that characterise societies. The question is, what form should we give the equations that connect the rates of change of these variables to their instantaneous values. In terms of symbols, if we use x, y and z to stand for integration, organisation and cohesion, we should have equations of the following form: dx/dt = f(x,y,z) dy/dt= g(x,y,z) dz/dt = h(x,y,z) The question is then, what should the functions f(x,y,z), g(x,y,z) and h(x,y,z) look like? Consider the way that organisation depends on integration. A more intuitive way of describing integration is as 'governmental power' and a more intuitive way of describing organisation is as 'wealth and commerce'. What history shows us is that a strong government helps to promote wealth and commerce - for example, the law and order created by the Roman empire, not to mention the Roman roads, made it much easier

to conduct trade throughout the Mediterranean and led to a commercial boom. In other words, 'governmental power' reinforces 'wealth and commerce', which is to say that integration reinforces organisation. On the other hand, a strong government can also be bad for wealth and commerce. This is because strong governments may take too much out of the economy in terms of tax and they may also inhibit the technological innovation that promotes economic growth. For example, the printing press was seen as a potentially subversive invention by governments in Europe and by the Ottoman empire, and these regimes were all keen to ban it. However, the relatively weak European rulers failed to enforce the ban, whereas the more powerful Ottoman emperors succeeded. The result was that, while Europe came on in leaps and bounds, the Ottoman empire remained economically backward. Thus, 'governmental power' can undermine 'wealth and commerce', which is to say that integration can undermine organisation. Now consider the way that integration depends on organisation. A wealthy society tends to produce a strong government (while a poor society produces a weak government) - consider, for example, how the power of the US government results from the enormous wealth it has at its disposal. In other words, organisation reinforces integration. Yet a rich populace is also harder to control because it has the resources to resist domination. Similarly, the European governments who saw the printing press as subversive were actually right. The dissemination of knowledge that printing made possible led to demands for democratisation, and eventually to things like the French revolution. In other words, 'wealth and commerce' can undermine 'governmental power', which is to say that organisation can undermine integration. Putting all this together, if we want to model how integration depends on organisation, say, we have a contradictory situation. One set of considerations tells us that organisation tends to increase integration, but another set of considerations tells us that organisation tends to decrease integration. Therefore, the function that relates the change of integration to the level of organisation should sometimes give a positive value and sometimes give a negative value, presumably depending on other factors. As we have seen, the same applies for the effect of integration on organisation. I won't argue it here in detail, but it can be shown that similar findings apply to the other combinations of variables. That is, integration and cohesion both increase each other and decrease each other, and organisation and cohesion both increase each other and decrease each other. I said that whether, say, organisation increases or decreases integration depends on 'other factors'. What could these other factors be? In the equations indicated above, we only have the three variables x, y, z (integration, organisation, cohesion) and the additional variable of t (time). It would be desirable to keep our model simple, not introducing any more variables, so the way that dx/dt (the change of integration) depends on y (the level of organisation) should be influenced solely by x, y, z and t or a subset of these. The same

applies for all the other combinations, i.e. how dx/dt depends on z, how dy/dt depends on x etc. The problem for dark age theory is to find a set of equations that can satisfy these requirements. That is to say, if dx/dt = f(x,y,z) then this should indicate that the contribution of y can sometimes be negative and sometimes positive, depending on the values of the other variables, and so on and so forth (for the contribution of z to dx/dt, the contribution of x to dy/dt etc.). [To be strictly correct, if t can influence whether y has a positive or negative effect, I should write, dx/dt = f(x,y,z,t).] To add to this broad requirement, there is another fundamental requirement, which is that the way that dx/dt depends on x, y, z and possibly t should be historically plausible. In other words, and this is obvious really, we ought to have a good reason for writing the equations in a particular way, which is to say it should be based on our understanding of how history actually works. I like to add three other requirements. These are simply based on my aesthetic prejudices, and it may be found that they are inconsistent with the requirement for historical plausibility, in which case they will need to be jettisoned. Firstly, I would like the way that dx/dt depends on y to be independent of t, and preferably dependent solely on z. (Similarly for the other combinations, e.g. dx/dt should depend on z in a way that depends solely on y, and dy/dt should depend on x in a way that depends solely on z etc.) Secondly, I would like the three equations (for dx/dt, dy/dt and dz/dt) to be of identical form, with only the roles of the variables changing. This implies that g(x,y,z) = f(y,z,x) and h(x,y,z) = f(z,x,y). Thirdly, I would like x, y and z to be limited to the range 0 to 1 (this is perhaps not just prejudice there is some reason for thinking that a society cannot be more than 100% integrated, i.e. integration = 1, or less than 0% integrated, i.e. integration = 0). One final requirement is that when we solve the equations, whatever they might be, we should find that they result in chaotic behaviour, just like Lorenz's model of the atmosphere. This is on the basis that history is actually seen to be a chaotic process, like the weather, with no regular cycles but with continuous fluctuations of differing amplitude. If we can do this, we will have produced a simple mathematical model of historical change, and it will exceed Blaha's model in richness because it incorporates political, economic and social variables. To give the idea, a possible form for the equations might be dx/dt = y (0.5 - z) + z (0.5 - y) dy/dt = z (0.5 - x) + x (0.5 - z) dz/dt = x (0.5 - y) + y (0.5 - x) For example, the first part of the first equation above says that organisation has a positive effect on integration when the cohesion is below 50% and a negative effect on integration when the cohesion is above 50%. However, experimentation with this particular model does not yield convincing results and the equations are also dubious on theoretical

grounds. This then is the problem I would like to set readers of this newsletter: develop a set of equations that fulfil the above considerations and produce history-like fluctuations. THE COMING DARK AGE Newsletter January, 2004 1. INTRODUCTION This month's edition describes how President Bush seems to be refuting all the predictions of a coming dark age. Past editions of the newsletter are at the following address: http://www.darkage.fsnet.co.uk/Newsletter.htm I welcome all comments, suggestions and contributions, especially the latter. Please forward this newsletter to anyone you think might be interested. Marc Widdowson 2. PRESIDENT BUSH - WARRIOR OF THE COMING DARK AGE Environmentalism is a classic illustration of the way western civilisation is heading for a dark age. Through environmentalism the west tends to prohibit its own economic progress. The industrial revolution, of course, could never have got started if today's environmental regulations had been in force. All those beautiful green fields that were covered with houses and factories belching out thick black smoke! It would never have been allowed. The environmentalists have a pessimistic, static view of the world. They do not appreciate that the human race learns from its mistakes and that the more control our technology gives us over the environment, the better we are able to protect it. For example, if human technological progress continues, one day we may be able to put our factories and industry into space, and open up new areas for humans to live in orbit or on other planets, and all the environmentalist worries will become completely irrelevant. Anyway, environmentalism is what you would expect for a declining civilisation - that utter failure of imagination. Therefore it was a shock to dark age theory when George W Bush became President of the US and one of his first acts was to reject the Kyoto Treaty. President Bush said that he was not going to hold back America's economic growth just because of some half-baked environmentalist theories. This is not what you expect in a declining civilisation! President Bush seemed to be taking America in the reverse direction. Since then, President Bush has had an uncanny habit of contradicting dark age predictions. Sometimes I almost feel that he has read my book and is deliberately contradicting each and every point. I said that it was an illustration of the west's weakness that after the first Gulf War and after the Kosovo crisis, Saddam Hussein and President Milosevic were left in power - the allies did not leave Hitler in power after the

Second World War. However, Milosevic was then handed over to the war crimes tribunal, and Bush, as we all know, launched a new war on Iraq, winning it easily and eventually even capturing Saddam. (It is surprising that Saddam, with all his resources, and with all the warning that he had, never came up with a better escape plan than hiding in a hole in the ground.) Not just in Iraq, but also in Afghanistan, President Bush has shown that he is not afraid to pull his punches and is determined to project America's power around the world. He is reasserting American and western hegemony. I thought that it was a clear indication of a civilisation in decline that the highly ambitious space programme of the early 1970s had been almost completely dismantled, and that there was no sign of humans returning to the moon. It seemed like the way the Romans invented the waterwheel but never brought it into widespread use. Future historians will say:- western civilisation landed on the moon, but somehow it never capitalised on its achievements - it was only after western civilisation collapsed and the dark age arrived that space travel became commonplace. But what happens next? President Bush declares that America is going to return to the moon and go on to Mars (manned missions). Our eschewal of nuclear power is another example similar to the Romans and the waterwheel. If we were a vigorous civilisation we would take up nuclear power on a massive scale, so that electricity became incredibly cheap and things like launching spacecraft into orbit would be trivially inexpensive. But we are put off by those environmentalist-style fears - fear of the unknown basically. If nuclear power had existed four or five hundred years ago, in the days of Queen Elizabeth I, private individuals like Sir Walter Raleigh would have developed it of their own accord, not worrying about governmental regulations which wouldn't have existed. They would have got the serfs on their estates to build nuclear power stations, so creating a fantastic new source of energy. Of course, nuclear power wasn't available then, but they did basically the same, with windmills and waterwheels. If we combined their attitudes with our modern technology, nuclear power would now be expanding as rapidly as those medieval technologies once did. In fact, we have anti-nuclear regulation, which is a sign of our stagnation and decadence. Then what happens? President Bush declares that he is going to scrap all the safety regulation that now holds back nuclear power. He is going to let private entrepreneurs do what they like, just as they did hundreds of years ago. Of course, they may create quite a mess at first, but in the long run the whole human race will feel the benefit. This Bush initiative is even more surprising, given that Bush is an oil man, and so seems to have much to lose if nuclear power takes over. Many people feel that a dark age could not come again because of our modern technology. The best argument against that seemed to be the case of Somalia, whose government and economy collapsed over ten years ago. Since 1990, Somalia has been in a dark age - and this is despite globalisation, satellite communications and the rest of it. In principle, there is no reason why the whole world could not follow

Somalia into a dark age. But recently American-sponsored talks have secured peace among Somalia's warring factions, and they have agreed to set up a new government. Yet again, President Bush seems to be turning back the tide of the dark age. So what does this mean? Is the Bush presidency putting an end to the whole dark age thesis? Possibly. But I have always said that the progression to a dark age is never smooth. History is constantly fluctuating. There will be periods of seeming recovery even though the overall trend is downwards. After all, in the 6th century AD, the Roman emperor Justinian reconquered large parts of the empire, recovering them from barbarian control. But the Roman Empire disappeared in the long run. We need to see whether a truly stable peace returns to Somalia. We need to see whether the US does actually make it to Mars, and if it does whether it is more than an academic-governmental gimmick. We need to see whether the American conquests in Afghanistan, Iraq and other places to come, actually lead to a true civil peace like the Roman and British empires, or whether it leads to an ongoing Vietnam-like situation. It may turn out that far from turning back the dark age, President Bush is actually bringing it on. Maybe he is leading the world into the kind of warlike free-for-all that is the basic definition of a dark age. If so he is to be commended. The dark age is the first step towards the reinvigoration of human progress. THE COMING DARK AGE Newsletter February, 2004 1. INTRODUCTION This month's edition describes some of the stories from the Thousand And One Nights, since these contradict the idea of Islam as an inevitably backward force in world affairs (an idea that has been promulgated by Francis Fukuyama to name just one example). Past editions of the newsletter are at the following address: http://www.darkage.fsnet.co.uk/Newsletter.htm I welcome all comments, suggestions and contributions, especially the latter. Please forward this newsletter to anyone you think might be interested. Marc Widdowson 2. THE THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS - ISLAM IN THE MIDDLE AGES Islam or the Islamic world tends to be presented as a backward, 'medieval' society, which has not caught up with 'modern times' like the west. Yet in the actual Middle Ages, the Islamic world was a powerhouse of science and technology. Muslims were in control of a vast empire stretching from Spain to Pakistan. This was also a culturally tolerant society. Jews flocked to Muslim rulers, fleeing the pogroms and other atrocities to which they were regularly subjected by mobs of fanatical Christians. When London and Paris were little more than

villages, characterised by sprawling cottages and streets of mud, Baghdad was a large and sophisticated metropolis, well lit at night, and home to a university and astronomical observatory. Here Muslim scholars studied classical Greek texts, and Muslim engineers made many new discoveries that would eventually prove essential for the European industrial revolution. The Thousand and One Nights is a collection of stories dating from this period. The accompanying legend is that the [historical] Islamic caliph Haroun ar-Rashid slept with a new virgin every night and had her killed in the morning. One night it was the turn of Scheherazade. She enchanted the caliph with a story, but didn't finish it before the dawn. As he wanted to hear the end, the caliph granted her another night. She finished the story but started another one. And so it went on, for a thousand and one nights, until Haroun ar-Rashid finally granted Scheherazade her life and freedom, and renounced his beastly practice of slaughtering virgins after he had deflowered them. Of course, this is complete nonsense, but it is a good hat on which to hang an otherwise disparate collection of stories, somewhat like Chaucer's 'Canterbury Tales'. The more familiar stories from the Arabian Nights are adventure yarns like Sinbad the Sailor, and Aladdin. But there are others in different genres, which provide a fascinating insight into medieval Islamic society. (These stories date from around 1000.) For example, in Sinbad the Porter (no relation to the Sailor), three young women have been shopping in town and they hire a porter to carry their purchases back to their house. Since he seems a pleasant enough fellow, they invite him inside. They then get to drinking and telling jokes, flirting with the porter, and the time slips by. Soon it is evening, and one of the young women goes down to the pool in the middle of the courtyard, takes off all her clothes, and bathes herself, splashing water over the porter and her companions. She then comes out of the pool, points between her legs, and asks the porter "What is this called?" He says "your womb", but she slaps him. He then says "your vulva", but she chides him for using such an ugly word and one of the other girls pinches him. "Your cunt" he says, but again they slap him and tell him off. So he continues, through "your clitoris, your pudenda, your pussy" and so on, until he has been slapped, punched and boxed numerous times. Eventually, he begs to be told, and the girl replies "The basil of the bridges", then puts her clothes back on. This is then repeated with the other two girls. His guesses again cause him to be punched and slapped (all in good fun), until finally the ladies tell him that the relevant parts are called 'the husked sesame' and 'the Inn of Abu Masrur' respectively. Now the porter himself takes his clothes off, bathes and sits on one of the young women's laps. They are delighted that he is such a good sport. He points between his legs and asks them to name what they see. "Your cock" says one, and he says "no this is an ugly word". Another says "Your penis" to which he replies "May God put you to shame". Then they try "your dick, your testicles, your prick" and so on, but he rejects each suggestion and they are all laughing until they fall on their backs. Eventually the women give up, and he tells them.

"It is the smashing mule." They ask him to explain himself and he replies "It is the one who grazes on the basil of the bridges, eats the husked sesame, and gallops in the Inn of Abu Masrur." They almost faint with laughing. That is just the beginning. It goes on from there, though turning into a rather darker story. Another story is that of the young man and the barber. A young man has formed a liaison with the vizier's daughter. One day she sends him word that her father is going to be out of town for the weekend, and that she will leave a certain window open, for him to come to her so that they can spend a night of passion. Anxious to appear his best the young man sends his servants into town to fetch a barber who will cut his hair, and he tells them to get him a barber who can cut his hair in silence - not one of those annoying barbers who prattle on incessantly. The servants come back with a barber who says he is just the man. However, the barber looks at the young man and says he looks ill. Then he starts doing some astrological calculations - a load of mumbo-jumbo - from which he deduces that the young man is going to some kind of rendezvous, which he says, judging from the position of the stars, appears to be ill-advised. The young man tells the barber to stop raving and just get on with cutting his hair or he will send for another barber. The barber replies that the young man has been very lucky to have hired him, for he is not just skilled in cutting hair, but also a physician, astrologer, alchemist, logician, mathematician and much else besides. He says that the young man would be mad not to heed his advice, and then he sends the young man's servants to fetch a bowl of water and other paraphernalia so that he can tell his fortune properly. He promises after he has done this he will get on and cut the young man's hair. The young man tells his servants he has decided not to have his hair cut after all. He tells them to give the barber four dinars and send him on his way, but the barber urges the young man not to spurn his assistance. "I knew your father," the barber says, "and performed many services for him, for which he rewarded me handsomely." And so it goes on. The barber makes a fuss about everything, and turns out to be one of the most prattlesome, annoying individuals ever to have existed. He succeeds in extracting from the young man the fact that he is meeting a young lady, and he forces himself on him as a helper, saying that he is good in such situations. Of course, the barber's "help" succeeds in ruining the whole thing, and culminates in the young man breaking his leg as he leaps from a window in a ruckus entirely due to the barber's meddling. Again, that is just the beginning of other stories in which the annoying, meddlesome barber has other adventures. Husain Haddawy's translation in the Everyman Library is particularly good and unexpurgated. The overall point is that all this surely gives a rather different impression of Islamic society than the benighted, 'medieval' mindset conveyed by people like the Taliban and the Wahhabi. The latter are actually products of the 20th and 21st centuries, reacting against economic and political conditions of the western-dominated world, especially as that world begins to crumble into a dark age.

THE COMING DARK AGE Newsletter March, 2004 1. INTRODUCTION This month's edition [slightly late - apologies] contains some criticisms, sent in by a reader, of the socio-historical theory underlying predictions of a coming dark age. The author (whom I will refer to as RR) makes two main points. The first is that while some civilisations seem to collapse in order to regenerate (the notion of the 'phoenix principle'), the history of others does not conform to this simple pattern. I have provided a response to this criticism further below. RR's second point uses the example of Easter Island to suggest that global civilisation MIGHT collapse once and for all, never to recover. I think he makes a very good case and I concede he may be correct. He will certainly find support among some dark age readers who believe that the finiteness of natural resources, which we are rapidly exhausting, presents an ultimate limitation to human history. One reader has conjured up the vision of a dead planet, circling the sun for eons to come, with at best some scattered human remnants eking a living from its barren surface. Personally, I believe that this will not happen and that humans will continue moving upwards and outwards as they have always done. But I admit that this is blind faith and I cannot conclusively prove that RR is wrong. Past editions of the newsletter are at the following address: http://www.darkage.fsnet.co.uk/Newsletter.htm I welcome all comments, suggestions and contributions, especially the latter. Please forward this newsletter to anyone you think might be interested. Marc Widdowson 2. HAS WIDDOWSON ERRED? It's clear that historical case studies are the best means by which to provide empirical support for Widdowson's hypotheses, since by looking at past civilizations, we can chart the course of all political, social and economic phenomena that he analyzes through all the phases of their development, whereas our current civilization, in so far as it is in the decline phase and has not yet fallen, is an incomplete case. Having said that, some historical case studies are 'harder' tests of this thesis than others. For instance, the thesis represents a compelling explanation for the rise, and also the decline and fall of civilization in the Western Roman Empire, as well as for the origins of the Renaissance that followed it. But, what about the Eastern Roman Empire? Arguably, its civilization did not actually collapse into a dark age per se. It still retained a central political authority, as well as economic organization and a degree of social cohesion (through

Orthodox Christianity and its associated Greek culture) that suggest a functioning (if unhealthy) civilization, as opposed to the sort of chaos one would expect in a dark age. It seems fair to say that rather than collapsing, the Byzantine Empire went into a sort of arrested decline that lasted for a thousand years. When the Byzantine Empire was finally conquered by the Ottomans, that does not appear to have been a collapse of civilization in the region into a dark age, but rather the absorption of one civilization by another. Following the Ottoman takeover of the region, there was still a clear, centralized political authority, an organized economy, and a high degree of social cohesion imposed through Islam. The Byzantine civilization was brought to an end, and yet 'civilization' as a political/economic/social phenomenon did not collapse into the chaos of a full-scale dark age within the Byzantine remnant territory. [Editor's note: See my response to this in Section 3, below.] As a different sort of 'hard' case, consider Easter Island. It is debatable whether the level of culture there was adequate for it to be called a 'civilization', at least in so far as they did not have a system of writing (as opposed to some sort of basic record-keeping). But, it did exhibit patterns consistent with the rise, decline and fall of a civilization; from settlement, to the sort of political/economic/social development required to have engaged in the massive project of carving, transporting and erecting the famous statutes, to the abandonment and desecration of those statues and sacred sites, and the descent of the island's culture into tribal factionalism, blood-feud and clan-rivalry warfare, cannibalism, and population collapse. Subsequently, of course, the Island was absorbed into Western civilization. But (admittedly this is a speculative question), is there any reason to think that a new civilization could have emerged from the ruins of the old? Presumably this could not have happened on Easter Island if it were left in a state of isolation, because its natural resources were totally exhausted. The Islanders completely extinguished the tall tree species, and even the sorts of useful bushes or strong, tall grasses that they would have needed in order to build/weave boats that could have allowed them to leave the island in search of a more resource-rich location. So, absent outside contact, escape from the island and colonization of a new location would not have been an option for them even if they had re-acquired the level of political/social/economic development necessary for them to do so. How then could they have regenerated into a new, vibrant civilization if they were 'trapped' on their exhausted island by its lack of resources? Presumably, resource limitation would have placed an exogenous limit on the pace and extent of their recovery from collapse. ('Exogenous' in the sense that resource limitation as such is not one of the three underlying primary causes, as opposed to secondary or contributing cause, of the decline of a civilization, since Widdowson explains resource limitation problems purely in terms of 'innovation failure'.) [Editor's note: and in that respect I (Widdowson) largely borrow from the excellent work by Julian L Simon; see especially his book "The Ultimate Resource"]

More generally, a substantive issue that flows from the methodological issue of easy versus hard cases is, how does Widdowson's thesis account for civilizations that do not appear to have followed the full pattern of development that he has outlined? What role do factors exogenous to those studied in this thesis (e.g. conquest of a declining though not yet fallen civilization by a rival civilization versus barbarians; effects of resource depletion on efforts at regeneration) play in such apparent outlier cases? (It would probably be worth doing a comprehensive empirical survey to determine the extent to which any apparent exceptions to the general pattern identified are outliers, statistically speaking - the more outliers, the narrower the range of 'empirical fit' that the thesis would possess, and vice versa). Finally, Widdowson is skeptical of environmental concerns, in that he views the challenges posed by environmental problems as challenges to (sometimes leading to failures of) innovation by a civilization, as opposed to an inherent limit on its development. Yet the Easter Island case would seem to be disturbing from the standpoint of our own global civilization, and the potential for the emergence of a new, technologically superior civilization following (at some point) the demise of our own. If, for example, we continue to consume non-renewable resources at a rapid rate, while failing to develop substitutes to replace them as they run out (the 'peak oil' issue possibly being an example of this), does that not potentially damage the ability of a budding future civilization to even equal our level of technological development, let alone surpass it? Our planet effectively is an isolated 'island' until we develop the ability to cheaply and efficiently colonize and exploit other planets. Presumably, it would take a substantial degree of recovery from the collapse of our own civilization before a future civilization could harness these extra-terrestrial resources, yet until that time, it would be limited to the resources available on Earth. If many of those non-renewable resources that would be of value to an industrial civilization have been depleted by our own civilization, than doesn't our innovation failure during the period when these resources are still relatively plentiful, yet are being consumed at a rapid rate, limit the prospects for a future recovery? 3. RESPONSE In the above piece, RR points out that the Eastern Roman Empire did not go through the same cycle of destruction and rebirth that the Western Roman Empire did. In essence, he says that while the notion of the Phoenix Principle, which sees dark ages as necessary for human progress, accounts well for the history of Western Europe, it does not really apply to Asia Minor. However, I think that one has to take a more sophisticated view than simply that there are individual, discrete civilisations which rise and fall in isolation. It is true that the dark age thesis may not be fully worked out in this respect, and I may have been responsible for over-simplifying things. Nevertheless, the thesis does pay attention to

two issues that are relevant to this. Firstly, history is SEAMLESS, in that all human societies have always been in contact, and have been exchanging ideas and material objects since time immemorial. We may divide history into discrete civilisations the same as we divide the earth's water into discrete oceans, but they are really connected. (Okay, the Americas, and to some extent Australia, may have been isolated for long periods, but this is true if we stick to the World Island, i.e. Africa, Asia and Europe.) Of course, the level of connectedness has been increasing, amounting to what in dark age theory is called an increase of scale, and that, for one thing, is directly related to the growth of technology - but all that is another issue. Secondly, history is characterised by a FERMENT, which means that it is a chaotic process, with fluctuations on all temporal and spatial scales. That is to say, you don't have a civilisation that rises smoothly to greatness, then does its thing successfully for a few centuries, then declines and disappears, for it all to start over again. On the contrary, when the civilisation is on the way up there are setbacks, and when it is on the way down it experiences periods of recovery, and what is more there are setbacks within the periods of recovery, and periods of recovery within the setbacks, and so on. The importance of the Phoenix Principle is that it says the setbacks are not merely negative, but are actually necessary for overall progress to occur. This seems to be a deep principle, applying not just to human history but to all complex, evolving systems. Putting this together, we have to stand well back and look at our planet as a whole. We should see it as being covered by essentially one human society. And we should recognise this as being in continual turmoil, characterised by everything from small disasters affecting local areas (the most common) up to huge catastrophes taking in continent-sized regions or even the world as a whole (the rarest, what we call dark ages). In this view, there is nothing to say that any particular 'civilisation' or geographical area should go into a dark age at any particular time. Yet while Asia Minor may not have experienced a definite dark age as Western Europe did, it was still part of this seamless global ferment. And it could be argued furthermore that Asia Minor's failure to experience a really catastrophic retrenchment was why it was later left behind by Western Europe, which had. The bottom line is that the case of Byzantium does not really contradict the basic socio-historical principles underlying the dark age thesis. It just illustrates the need for a more subtle approach than it is possible to give in a brief summary. THE COMING DARK AGE Newsletter April, 2004 1. INTRODUCTION

Last month the newsletter contained some comments on dark age theory by a reader (referred to as RR), along with a response to them. This month's newsletter contains another observation/query by the same reader and a corresponding response. This concerns the question of how civilisation arose in the first place. Why did the hunter-gatherers that existed on the earth in prehistoric times suddenly start developing cities and complex social institutions? Some have suggested that this can only have happened with the intervention of intelligent aliens, or some kind of master-race (the 'Watchers' or some such). I will present the explanation that is offered by dark age theory. Past editions of the newsletter are at the following address: http://www.darkage.fsnet.co.uk/Newsletter.htm I welcome all comments, suggestions and contributions, especially the latter. Please forward this newsletter to anyone you think might be interested. Marc Widdowson 2. POW! THE ORIGINS OF CIVILISATION A reader (RR) presents the following query/challenge. "Although I know this has not been a focus of your work, the cyclical nature of the historical processes you describe and analyze in your thesis does not account for the rise of civilization per se. That is, for the vast majority of humanity's existence, there were (as far as we know) no civilizations, just scattered tribes with almost no political order, based on a hunter-gatherer economy. What changed? Why did 'civilization' emerge as a phenomenon to begin with? It seems to me that any cyclical theory of historical patterns of change and continuity needs to at least touch on the issue of what sort of exogenous processes got the cycle going to begin with (not least because this point raises the issue of what sort of exogenous factors might 'break' the cycle, i.e. lead to a decline and collapse of civilization on a global scale that is not followed by a rebirth of a new civilization - see the Easter Island question above [in March 2004 newsletter]). I.e. the predictive value of your thesis depends to some extent on how it deals with this issue." MW responds: I agree. This is of interest and an important issue. Dark age theory cannot answer it in quite the way you would probably like, i.e. explaining how one thing led to another. An important concept of dark age theory is the principle of mutual causality - that in history many things interact in complex ways, and asking whether A caused B or B caused A is like asking whether the chicken came before the egg or vice versa. The way that dark age theory deals with the origin of civilisation revolves around the idea of ensembles. An ensemble is a self-consistent set of social institutions. The institutions that make up an ensemble are logically interdependent. None of them can exist in isolation. Each relies on the other. (Note: an institution is a set of

ideas and material objects that shape human relationships. A relationship is something that exists between two parties; there is a relationship between A and B if A's behaviour influences B's behaviour.) For example, take an institution like international air travel. You couldn't just introduce this one concept to, say, a tribe of Eskimo living a traditional lifestyle in the Canadian arctic, without making any other changes to their society. How are they going to pay for the flights? How will they learn to fly the planes? How will they build the planes? Where will they get the jet fuel from? Put a Boeing airliner in an Eskimo camp and it would be totally useless unless you made all sorts of other changes in their society, to establish maintenance, a supply chain, even reasons for travelling. No one is going to give them the jet fuel for free, for example. What are they going to give in exchange? Seal meat? And even if that is acceptable, they will need to have the concept of money, and a banking system for clearing international payments. Oh, and if you have a banking system, then you need to be able to read and write, so that you need a system of formal schooling. And so on and so on. Try to introduce international air travel to an Eskimo tribe and you will end up completely transforming their society, until it won't resemble an Eskimo tribe at all. This is the ensemble concept. You cannot have individual institutions piecemeal. You have to have them all together. They form a logically interdependent collection. According to dark age theory, there are three basic ensembles, depending on whether your society is dominated by 'friends', 'acquaintances' or 'strangers'. These are technical terms within dark age theory, but to put it simply, friends are people you care about, acquaintances are people you know, and strangers are people you don't know. Each of these types of society has its own characteristic ensemble of institutions. The type of society depends fundamentally on its size (more technically, it depends on 'scale' = the number of distinct other people any given individual typically interacts within a given time interval - for those with a background in sociology, this corresponds to what Durkheim called 'dynamic density'.) It is impossible in practice to have a group of a million people all of whom genuinely care about each other. Experience (i.e. anthropological and sociological research) shows that the largest group that can be dominated by 'friends' (in dark age theory terminology) is about 10-50. The acquaintance ensemble is most characteristically found in 'village-size' groups of roughly 1000 individuals. The stranger ensemble is typical of groups of 10,000 plus. The friend ensemble is found among people like the Eskimo or the hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari desert (who ceased to exist in the last few years, because of the policies of the Namibian government, but that is another matter). Such groups have a philosophy of share and share alike. They have very simple lifestyles. They have no leaders. This is because the small size of their groups means they can't live any other way. Why don't the Kalahari hunter-gatherers have computers? Is it because they are stupid? Of course not. (If you took someone who does have a computer, such as you the reader of this newsletter, and dumped you in the Kalahari desert. How long would you survive? Not very

long. Is that because you are stupid? Again, no. It is not brains that are the issue here.) The reason the Kalahari people don't have computers in their tiny band is because there is no way they could have the expertise to develop and build them in such a tiny group. (Think how many people it takes to develop Windows and keep bringing out new editions every year or so, for example.) On the other hand, think about say downtown New York, which is definitely a stranger-style society (most people are mutual strangers). Could they live with the same philosophy as the hunter-gatherers? Definitely not. Imagine if New York tried to go over to share and share alike. I could walk into any shop or anybody's home and 'borrow' whatever I wanted. How is that going to work? How are you going to react when someone comes to borrow your stereo, or browse in your refrigerator? Of course, you can go and browse in their refrigerator, or someone else's refrigerator. But it's not going to work is it? Similarly, if you took away the mayor, the police, the law courts. You would literally have anarchy. (I know some idealists out there think that anarchy could work, but the few experiments to establish truly anarchistic communes with more than a few dozen individuals have invariably ended in failure.) If there were no police in New York, and no municipal authority maintaining the drains and the traffic lights and so on, it would rapidly become an intolerable place to live. We get back to the Eskimos and aircraft scenario. To make New York work, you need, for example, plumbers. To have plumbers you have to have food shops and clothes shops (because plumbers can't grow their own food and make their own clothes, else they would have no time for plumbing). To have these shops you need money. Therefore you need reading and writing and the ability to count. You need banks. You need a set of laws to stop the banks ripping their customers off and vice versa. And so on. As soon as you have plumbers, you have to have a whole lot of other things, and you end up with a very complex society and a big city (i.e. for all those shops and banks and schools and things). If you take away the plumbers, the drains are soon going to get blocked and the toilets will jam and the water pipes will burst, and quite soon the whole infrastructure will fall apart, and the city will become an intolerable place to live. People will leave and spread across the landscape, until they end up like those hunter-gatherers - small, scattered groups of 'friends', with no strangers in sight. The principle of mutual causality applies. The big city needs plumbers. Plumbers need the big city. Don't ask which came first. It is a chicken and egg situation. They arrive together and disappear together. You can't have plumbers first and then a little bit later the big city. Similarly you can't have the big city first and then a little bit later get yourself some plumbers. They can only exist in conjunction with each other. Civilisation, obviously, is basically what I have called the stranger-style society, with its characteristic institutional ensemble. Some of the basic elements of this institutional ensemble are political leadership, a government bureaucracy, writing (or at least some means of recording information), some kind of currency (for commercial transactions), and other things. The ensemble concept explains why (1) civilisations arise (and

disappear) fairly rapidly, and (2) all civilisations are much the same in their basic institutions. So how did civilisation arise? The answer of dark age theory is that the scale of the relevant societies reached the level at which strangers predominated and they flopped over into the stranger-style institutional ensemble. It was a bit like a lump of nuclear material reaching critical mass. Below the critical mass everything is fine. But go just a little beyond the critical mass and POW! Civilisation arose when human societies got to the critical density of strangers, and POW! So why did they reach this 'critical mass' or scale? Natural human increase for one thing. It is remarkable how humans had reached practically every part of the globe thousands of years ago - even the remotest Pacific islands. This is because humans didn't easily start living packed together at stranger-style densities. Rather they tried to get away from each other at first and spread out across the planet, getting as far away from each other as possible. It was only when the planet was filled up that scale began to rise on a local basis. Naturally, scale rose fastest and furthest in the most desirable areas - e.g. the river valleys, of the Nile, the Tigris/Euphrates, the Yangtse, which could support higher populations. That is why civilisation first rose in these places. That is the basic situation anyway. There are refinements that one can add to this theory. For example, it is theorised that ten thousand years ago, the climate was wetter than it is now and the whole area of Egypt was quite lush. People lived relatively spread out. But then the climate became drier, and the lands began to turn to desert. People were forced out of the desert and they crowded into the Nile valley, which was a narrow strip that was the only still well-watered territory in the whole area. Scale rose dramatically, and people found themselves in the stranger ensemble, i.e. civilisation. It was like the separate parts of a hydrogen bomb being forced together, reaching critical mass and going POW!. POW! Scale. Ensembles. Friends, Acquaintance and Strangers. These are the concepts you need to explain the origins of civilisation. THE COMING DARK AGE Newsletter May, 2004 1. INTRODUCTION This month's edition contains a description of the sources available to historians with respect to the last European dark ages, i.e. for the first two or three centuries after the fall of the Western Roman Empire in AD 476. Past editions of the newsletter are at the following address: http://www.darkage.fsnet.co.uk/Newsletter.htm I welcome all comments, suggestions and contributions, especially the latter. Please forward this newsletter to anyone you think might be interested. Marc Widdowson 2. DARK AGE SOURCES

The history of the post-Roman dark ages is the history of a number of 'barbarian kingdoms', which established themselves in the territory of the former Roman empire. The main ones were the Anglo-Saxons in Britain, the Franks in Gaul, the Visigoths in Spain, and the Ostrogoths (up to the mid-sixth century) and Lombards (later sixth century onwards) in Italy. To unravel their history, we can draw on two types of material: (1) narrative sources, which tell a story, and (2) everything else, such as wills, letters and law codes. Narrative sources are the most direct since they relate events in sequence, telling us who did what to whom and, if we are lucky, when they did it. They are histories in essentially the same way as a modern history book, though to be recognised as original sources they are histories that were written closest in time to the events they describe. For example, Bede is normally recognised as the historian of the Anglo-Saxons, Gregory of Tours as the historian of the Franks, Jordanes as the historian of the Goths (Visigoths and Ostrogoths), and Paul the Deacon as historian of the Lombards. These are perhaps four of the most famous, as they have the liveliest styles and wrote at the greatest length, but there are others. For example, Isidore of Seville wrote a 'History of the Goths', while Fredegar wrote a 'Chronicle' of the Franks and there is an anonymous 'Book of the History of the Franks'. The quality of these narrative sources varies considerably. The 'Histories' of Gregory of Tours are almost like a novel and can be witty and engaging. Others, which tend to be called 'chronicles', give a year-by-year, bare-bones description of major events like battles and deaths of kings. Each year gets a sentence or two at most, and sometimes nothing at all. Overall, there are possibly no more than a couple of dozen narrative sources originating in the barbarian kingdoms from which we can construct their history, and most of these give very little information. It may be three dozen if we include the works of a few Byzantine (eastern Roman) historians, who sometimes mention events in the west (recalling that the eastern Roman empire did not collapse at the same time as the western empire, but continued in existence for another thousand years). One could also add numerous biographies of saints, of which there are hundreds. However, they are not usually very good as narrative sources because their main aim is to glorify the saint who is the subject of the biography, not to tell a coherent history of the time. They are often full of miracle stories with just the occasional detail giving away some important insight into events. They are also biased, putting a particular spin on events in order to show their chosen saint in a good light, and perhaps blacken the reputation of his enemies. Historians have come to realise that the same is true of the other narrative sources, though perhaps in a way that is not so blatant. Most of the authors of the narrative sources were churchmen and that gave them a particular agenda, such as to promote the authority of the bishops over that of the kings, and this agenda finds its way into their writings. Furthermore, the writings were often modified when they were copied in later centuries, depending on the agendas of the people of those times. For example, a great

family might encourage a history to be rewritten with an emphasis on its own ancestors' contribution, thus giving a distorted picture. Indeed, the reason we have so few sources from the dark ages is that those which did not suit the agendas of later centuries were simply dropped and no longer copied for posterity. It is also important to recognise that some of the authors were writing about things that happened a hundred or more years before their time, but we are forced to rely on them, because there is simply nothing better. Occasionally, we can cross-refer to different sources - and that sometimes shows that the authors distorted or confused events - but much of the time we are forced to rely on them alone. We have to take everything they say with a pinch of salt, often reading between the lines to see where they might be misleading us, deliberately or otherwise. Turning to the other type of material - non-narrative sources - these have their own problems. They give just a snapshot of a particular incident or a particular person, and there is the obvious danger of generalising too much from just one or a few examples. These sources were even less concerned about building an overall picture of events than saints' biographies were. For example, imagine if someone tried to construct a history of the world in the twentieth century just from your letters and emails. Do you mention all the major events and personalities of the twentieth century in your correspondence - World War Two, Marilyn Monroe, the Bretton Woods agreement? Perhaps, perhaps not. Most of your letters are likely to be concerned with the everyday details of your personal life. If they mention major historical events it will not be in a systematic way, and it will probably miss out lots of background information that you and your correspondent take for granted. With law codes there is the perennial bug-bear - if a law existed against something, does that prove the problem in question was a common one? The answer is probably, sometimes, sometimes not, and it can be very difficult to tell which is which. We can glean all sorts of interesting information from letters, wills and law codes, but they often produce as many questions as answers. The upshot is that for the two or three centuries of dark ages following the fall of Rome, the history is confused, distorted, full of gaps and sometimes self-contradictory. When modern historians write about the period they often hedge their arguments with 'perhaps', 'possibly', 'might have been' and so on. The same will be the case for the dark age we are about to enter. As truth becomes increasingly less respected, as standards of scholarship decline, as war and conflict make it harder to gather data and to communicate with other scholars, history will become a rare and precious commodity.

THE COMING DARK AGE Newsletter June, 2004 1. INTRODUCTION

This month's (tardy) newsletter is a brief one. It contains a commentary by one of the dark age team on the work of Ronald Inglehart, putting recent thinking on Inglehart's work in a broader dark age perspective. Past editions of the newsletter are at the following address: http://www.darkage.fsnet.co.uk/Newsletter.htm I welcome all comments, suggestions and contributions, especially the latter. Please forward this newsletter to anyone you think might be interested. Marc Widdowson 2. RONALD INGLEHART Ronald Inglehart is known for his theory of postmaterial re-alignment ("The silent revolution"), which seems to be confined to the western post-industrial societies. Dark age theory incorporates the basic themes picked up by Inglehart (who perhaps expresses them better), but also gives a wider background with which to approach his statements. Inglehart says that generations which have not been affected by deprivation and war opt - in accordance with the pyramid of Maslow - for what he terms postmaterialistic values. While materialistic values are typically security, creation of wealth, order etc. postmaterialistic values strongly drift to the left if we take the traditional left-right cleavage. They are about individual self-fulfilment, the preservation of the environment, greater participation etc. It is here, where Dark Age theory comes in. It has recently been argued that in the face of new insecurities (globalisation creating competition on the labour market, terrorism), there has been a reaction against and a weakening of those postmaterialistic attitudes. At first glance, this may be true. However, while I am ready to admit that on the surface radical feminist and green movements figure less prominently, many of their statements have become mainstream. The never ending quest for gender equality, the stagnation in the field of nuclear power, the strong notion that technology poses a threat to democracy seem to add some justification to this claim. The point is that, although times may be getting tougher again, this slow, gradual shift is unlikely to root out the attitudes which have taken hold as a consequence of postmaterialistic ideologies. On a deeper level and in the long term, these attitudes are conducive to disintegration, disorganisation and discohesion. A ! crisis may change the trend or delay the break down but it will not be able to postpone it forever. This is because order, wealth and cohesion ultimately make anti-state, "parasitic" and anti-social behaviour pay. In a similar way, the individual, although it knows that ultimately it is going to die, has to continue its struggle based on the illusion that things will go on forever. Here is a link on Ingelhart http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/069107786X/qid=108402110 5/sr=1-7/ref=sr_1_7__i7_xgl14/103-4727272-2313460?v=glance&s=books THE COMING DARK AGE Newsletter

July, 2004 1. INTRODUCTION This month's newsletter contains some observations on the work of Oswald Spengler and the changing character of the American presidency. Past editions of the newsletter are at the following address: http://www.darkage.fsnet.co.uk/Newsletter.htm I welcome all comments, suggestions and contributions, especially the latter. Please forward this newsletter to anyone you think might be interested. Marc Widdowson 2. THE AGE OF CAESARISM In his book 'Decline of the West' (German: Untergang des Abendlandes), Oswald Spengler suggested that civilisations go through four 'seasons' like the seasons of the year. They start in spring, with vigour and the seeds of greatness. They flourish in summer. In autumn they ripen, and in some ways this is their best time even though decay is already setting in. Finally, in winter they become skeletal, cold and spiritless - Spengler had in mind the mechanistic industrial civilisation that had taken shape during his lifetime (he was writing around the time of the first world war). Spengler also wrote of 'the age of caesarism', which he believed European civilisation was entering at the beginning of the twentieth century. His model was Roman civilisation and the way that, around the time of Christ, the Roman republic had given way to the era of absolutist emperors. First there was Julius Caesar, who became too powerful as a result of his military victories, and was accused of having the ambition of turning the Roman empire into his personal property. He was stopped in his tracks when he was assassinated by a group of senators - including Julius Caesar's friend and protg, Brutus - who believed that they were standing up for the ideals of the republic. Yet soon Julius Caesar's adopted son Augustus achieved absolute power on his own behalf, after a new round of civil wars. Augustus became the supreme and permanent ruler of the empire (like an African 'president-for-life') even though he was careful never to say explicitly that that was what had happened. In the days of the republic, the citizens of Rome had been a noble group of equals. But with the advent of Augustus and his successors, they had become the slaves, or subjects, of an all-powerful autocrat. Spengler felt that western civilisation was undergoing the same transformation, and indeed the first few decades of the twentieth century were characterised by the dismantling of democracy, and the rise of fascism and dictatorship in numerous western countries. (For an excellent discussion of this process, see Mark Mazower's book "Dark Continent"). On the other hand, the dictatorships of the early twentieth century collapsed after not so many decades. Some of the last to hold out were Franco's Spain, and the neo-Tsarist Soviet Empire, but they too disappeared in the mid-70s

and early 90s respectively. The idea of democracy, seemingly, was restored. In the light of Spengler's thesis, developments in the United States are now very provocative. Those who study conspiracy websites will be familiar with such propositions as that the last American election was (partially) rigged and that electronic voting machines, of a highly dubious nature, are being introduced in order to ensure that future elections may be rigged even more effectively. There is also the idea that manufactured terrorist threats may be used to shut down the elections, or at least to frighten people into voting 'the right way'. In short, many people believe that President Bush would like to be the dictator of the United States and that he is surreptitiously working to achieve that goal. But it is not just President Bush. President Clinton had already tried to overturn the rule that prevents presidents from standing for a third term. President Bush also likes to present himself as a warrior, as seen in the incident when he flew a fighter plane onto the deck of the American aircraft carrier USS Lincoln to declare 'mission accomplished' over the recent Iraq war. Presidential candidate John Kerry is also tuning in to the spirit of the age by boasting about his own soldierly credentials and promising that he will enthusiastically lead the United States in its new agenda of foreign conquest. This contrasts with presidents like Kennedy, Nixon and Carter, who might have been US commanders in chief and sponsored military actions (e.g. Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, Iran hostage rescue), but who did not seem to wallow in militarism. It will be interesting therefore to see how the US presidency evolves over the next few decades. It is possible that Spengler may be proved right after all, and the presidents will turn into quasi-hereditary autocrats with the process of democratic election being a sham at best. History after all does not go smoothly always in one direction. The dictatorships of the earlier twentieth century may have disappeared, but that does not mean that dictatorship has been vanquished once and for all. It can always come back. Fifty years before Julius Caesar, Rome had already been subjected to the dictator Sulla. His reign lasted only a short while, and initially seemed to be just an aberration. Yet in hindsight it could be seen as a trial run for the ascendancy of Julius Caesar, which was itself a trial run for the more far-reaching absolutism of Augustus Caesar. In the same way, perhaps the Hitlers, Stalins and Mussolinis of the last century were merely a trial run for the much powerful dictators who will be seizing control during this one.

THE COMING DARK AGE Newsletter August, 2004 1. INTRODUCTION This month's newsletter describes how 'barbarians' invaded the Roman Empire by a process of steady infiltration, coming as asylum seekers and

economic migrants, rather than in the form of roaming warbands as is traditionally pictured. The parallels to today are self-evident. Past editions of the newsletter are at the following address: http://www.darkage.fsnet.co.uk/Newsletter.htm I welcome all comments, suggestions and contributions, especially the latter. Please forward this newsletter to anyone you think might be interested. Marc Widdowson 2. BARBARIAN INVASION The problem for the Roman Empire, it has been said, was not so much the barbarian at the gate as the barbarian already in the city. The Roman Empire was a vast, wealthy, pacified region with a large population density, a uniform currency and an advanced infrastructure that included markets, banking facilities and an extensive road network. Not surprisingly this acted like a honey pot for the more enterprising of those who lived in the underdeveloped regions beyond the imperial frontier. Within the empire you could expect to enjoy a far more comfortable and varied lifestyle than was available in the backward peasant communities beyond it. From earliest times, therefore, the empire drew in migrants looking for work and hoping to make their fortunes within the Roman economy. As the centuries went by, some of these migrants became very wealthy and took up powerful positions within the Roman administration. They were more vigorous than the pampered Romans who had all but given up work for a life of idleness supported by the state. Inexorably, the barbarians transformed Roman society. In the west, they exercised authority on the local level, as the central government became increasingly detached and ineffectual. By the end of the fifth century, the western emperor had ceased to exist even in name, and there were now barbarian kings ruling in Italy, Spain and France. In Britain, things had gone much further, the economy had collapsed and the landscape was divided up among numerous, petty warlords. In due course, these barbarian kingdoms would evolve into the new European countries, which reinvigorated the west and eventually asserted their power over the entire planet. Taking Gaul, as an example, this came to be ruled by the people known as the Franks. Gaul refers to an area that is based on modern France, and includes Belgium and parts of the modern Netherlands, Germany and Switzerland. The 'Franks' is a catch-all term. Historians have come to realise that it was a rather vague word, not a precise ethnic or tribal name - a bit like the term 'blacks' or 'Asians' today. It described people of a broadly Germanic culture, but it does not mean that they were necessarily the same in religion or political affiliation. They had arrived within the boundaries of the Roman Empire by different processes and at different times over a period of some five centuries. Some had been captured and brought in as slaves. Some had come voluntarily to meet the Roman demand for labour. Some had arrived as refugees, fleeing from the Huns and other mounted raiders coming out of the Eurasian heartland. And some entered as raiders themselves. In the latter case, the Romans usually bought them off, paying them to defend the Empire

against other barbarian groups following along behind, and incorporating them into the Roman army as so-called federate troops. The Franks, at any rate, were coming into the empire for a very long time. Some of their tribal names were known to Julius Caesar. On two separate occasions, groups of Franks were formally settled within the empire and assigned a military role as defenders of Gaul's borders. At the same time, there was a continual influx of migrants, who settled primarily in a belt north of the Roman road from Cologne to Boulogne. This geographical concentration does not imply a coherent or planned movement. It probably arose from many independent decisions, since individuals tended to migrate to places that they had heard something about and where they could expect to find some of their own kind. Most of the Franks coming in to the empire were peaceful. There was occasionally some violence and raiding, but the ringleaders were captured and put to death by the Romans, which seems to have ensured that the incidents remained isolated. The important thing is that Franks had official status inside Gaul. They did not stand in opposition to the Roman imperial regime but were part of it. Frankish migrants took on a way of life that was indistinguishable from that of their neighbours. It was only in language, clothing and perhaps religion that they retained a separate identity. Instead of gradually being eroded, as one might expect, these cultural differences seem to have become more keenly preserved as time went on. This was perhaps for several reasons, which tended to work in a positive feedback. Firstly, as the migrant community grew, there would have been less need for new arrivals to adapt. Secondly, the troubles at the centre of the empire in the fifth century may have reduced its prestige and thereby the attractiveness of its culture. Thirdly, Frankish migrants who achieved high positions may have served as role models showing the possibility of being both a Frank and a citizen of the Roman empire. Franks had been making good careers in Roman service long before the time of Clovis, who was the first Frank to become king of Gaul. In the early fourth century, they were achieving the status of tribunes, i.e. army officers in charge of non-Roman auxiliary troops. As time went on, Franks acquired increasing levels of responsibility, eventually taking on the highest levels of command in the Roman army proper, and parlaying this achievement into success in the political sphere. Franks variously served as supreme commanders of the Roman armed forces in Gaul and other theatres, held positions in the civil administration, obtained seats in the Roman senate, and were appointed as consuls. They even reached the imperial throne itself. In the middle of the fourth century, the emperor Magnentius had a Frankish mother and therefore a whole set of Frankish relatives. He was followed soon after by the short-lived emperor Claudius Silvanus, who was himself a Frank and indeed a Christian. Franks were therefore highly active, from at least the mid-fourth century

onward, in the internal politics and international relations of the Roman empire. This is both as individuals and as organised military units. The grave of Clovis's father, Childeric, was discovered in the Belgian town of Tournai in the seventeenth century. This is the most treasure-filled grave known from the late Roman period, and it shows that Clovis's father was a very rich man with extensive property and business interests. Childeric also apparently held an official imperial position as a Roman provincial governor in northern Gaul. In other words, Childeric was no parvenu. He seems to have come from a family that had been established in Gaul long enough to acquire considerable political and economic clout. He fits very much into the mould of other such successful Franks. Some time after his father's death, Clovis acquired the same office that his father had enjoyed, as provincial governor. Like his father, he was known as king of the Franks, but this did not imply that he ruled over a territorial kingdom. It was a position more like that of community leader for an ethnic minority. At this time, the last western emperor had just been deposed and the political situation in Gaul was quite threatening. The Goths, who had been given control of the administration in the south, were proving somewhat oppressive rulers. They were threatening to take over the rest of Gaul, but instead the Roman population chose the more Romanised Clovis as their champion. With Roman encouragement, Clovis took over many of the provinces of Gaul, although the Goths, despite being defeated in battle, retained a sizeable enclave along the Spanish border and Mediterranean coast. In recognition of his achievements, Clovis was made an honorary consul by the eastern Roman emperor, who still ruled in Byzantium. In principle, Clovis reported to this eastern Roman emperor, but in practice, Gaul had become an autonomous state under Frankish rule. When Clovis died, control of the government passed to his sons, and Clovis's descendants were to rule Gaul for another 250 years. From all this we learn a few things. Firstly, the barbarians did not come in a sudden invasion and 'conquer' the Roman Empire. They came gradually and steadily took it over. Secondly, while the first barbarian migrants were slaves or took on menial jobs, such as farm labourer, the barbarians in time rose to the highest positions and in fact were really the people responsible for keeping the empire going. Thirdly, the barbarians took over all the technologies, institutions and social practices of Rome, remaining distinctive only in a few very precise areas, such as the clothes that they wore. Fourthly, the transition from Roman civilisation to the barbarian successor civilisation had no sharp cut-offs. It happened seamlessly and without anybody really noticing what was happening. When, on the dark age site, therefore, we talk about today's 'barbarians' and 'barbarian invasion', this is by no means intended in a negative or insulting way. On the contrary, the barbarian invaders are the people of the future. They are the people who prop up the declining civilisation for a while, and who are destined to take over and improve on it, eventually becoming the new political, economic and cultural leaders of the world.

(Thanks to Justin B for suggesting this topic) THE COMING DARK AGE Newsletter September, 2004 1. INTRODUCTION This month's newsletter is a review of the book 'Our Final Century' by the Cambridge astronomer Martin Rees. Since dark age theory holds as an axiom that today is a typical moment in history, not a special moment in history, I am immediately prejudiced against a book whose title implies that we are living in a special, culminating era of the human story. However, Martin Rees's book is more balanced than is suggested by its attention grabbing title. A lot of the content will already be familiar to dark age theorists, and although the author does have a few original comments and insights, the book's main value is as a summary of the broad range of potential catastrophes facing humanity. Past editions of the newsletter are at the following address: http://www.darkage.fsnet.co.uk/Newsletter.htm I welcome all comments, suggestions and contributions, especially the latter. Please forward this newsletter to anyone you think might be interested. Marc Widdowson 2. 'OUR FINAL CENTURY' Review of 'Our Final Century: Will Civilisation Survive the Twenty-First Century?' by Martin Rees, published in Arrow Books 2004 (originally published by William Heinemann 2003). 'Our Final Century' is largely a compendium of current concerns environmental catastrophe, meteorite impact, bioterrorism or biotechnological accident leading to release of a nightmare disease - that could supposedly wipe out humanity or at least knock us back to the stone age. By his own admission, the author has treated each one in a relatively standalone manner. If there is an overall theme it is that of the 'sorcerer's apprentice' - there may be avenues of scientific research we should not go down because of the massive potential ramifications of any mistakes. Martin Rees sums up his theme as being that humanity is more at risk than at any earlier phase in its history, and he also observes that people's expectations for how long our civilisation is likely to last have shrunk substantially in recent times. There is much there that any dark age theorist could agree with, and although a lot of the material is quite familiar, the author makes it interesting and readable and adds some wise insights of his own. He makes a very good point that the conquest of space will not act as a release valve for the population problem here on earth, just as the discovery of America did not halt population growth in England. I also liked what he had to say in refutation of the 'end of science' thesis, arguing that science offers infinite

surprises. He is very balanced - although this could be seen as a drawback, in that he presents worst-case scenarios then acknowledges that they are extremely unlikely and asks a lot of rhetorical questions - will humanity move out into the cosmos, or will we destroy ourselves first? etc. - without ever answering them. To be fair, he does give his overall assessment that we have a fifty-fifty chance of surviving the coming century, though I think this is just a guesstimate, not based on any particular reasoning. My personal prejudice is that the future will be much the same as the past and therefore I have a more sanguine view of human prospects than Martin Rees does. In fact, he discusses precisely this notion, that the future will be much the same as the past, which he describes as a scientific principle, i.e. the 'principle of mediocrity'. According to this, we are ordinary, rather than special. Hence the earth is not at the centre of the universe with everything else revolving around it. Rather there has been a growing realisation - hardwon, as Galileo can report - that the earth is a mediocre planet around a mediocre star in a mediocre galaxy in a perfectly typical segment of the universe. To me, the idea that we live in a special era of culmination falls foul of this principle of mediocrity. However, Martin Rees describes how Brandon Carter, originator of the cosmological concept of the 'anthropic principle', has used the principle of mediocrity to predict our imminent demise. That is to say, Carter argues that if we are 'in the middle' that means as many people will come after us as have lived before us - and since the human population is much larger than it was it will not take very long for that to occur. Martin Rees observes that this is a neat argument but that it seems like a piece of sophistry and I concur. Apart from anything else, there seems to be no good reason why we should be in the middle in terms of total number of humans rather than in terms of elapsed time. At any rate, I think it is more reasonable to interpret the principle of mediocrity in the sense that the future will be as full of disasters and setbacks as the past was, but that overall and in the long run humanity will continue its upward progress. When Martin Rees tries to present our situation as a special one by saying that "science is advancing faster than ever", he is merely stating a truism. People a thousand years ago could have said the same thing, and so could people a thousand years in the future. In fact, Martin Rees quotes H G Wells making similar observations back in 1902 about the opportunities and threats of accelerating technological growth during the 20th century. Therefore it could be argued that the 21st century is no different from any other century in this respect. While it is true that we have become a lot more effective at wreaking havoc, there are also a lot more of us, and our capabilities do have a positive side in that we can also fix things a lot more effectively. In the military sphere it has been pointed out that battlefield casualty rates have remained fairly constant over the centuries despite vast increases in weapon lethality, and this is because people have evolved responses to those increases in lethality - albeit slowly and reluctantly and not without disasters like the Somme. I would say that in his more pessimistic passages Martin Rees underestimates human resilience. He himself notes that 187 million

people died in the 20th century through war and other man-made disasters, and I don't think he gives sufficient credit to the way that the human race nevertheless picked itself up and carried on. Another personal prejudice of mine is that setbacks and disasters are actually necessary for progress to occur - we can only really learn from our mistakes the Somme had to happen before military thinkers would wake up to the threat of the machine gun and the need for new infantry tactics. Martin Rees acknowledges that biological extinction is a natural and indeed necessary part of the evolutionary process, but he doesn't recognise that something similar applies in social or technological evolution. Some of the fears that Martin Rees describes are really fear of change - for example, humans inventing a race of intelligent machines that eventually displace us altogether. If that is the way evolution is headed, why should we really worry about it? It doesn't affect our lives in the here and now. To try and prevent it seems to me a call for stagnation. In any case, despite the appearance of books warning about these nightmare scenarios, human ingenuity will not be repressed and things will unfold of their own accord. Charles II ordered the destruction of machines that he feared could put artisans out of work, but the industrial revolution happened anyway. By contrast, the powerful Chinese emperors succeeded in holding back technological change, and look what happened to them. Finally, I think it is unfortunate that Martin Rees says at one point "The most conspicuous sub-national threat today comes from Islamic extremists, motivated by traditional values and beliefs far removed from those prevailing in the US and Europe." Here is not the place to go over everything that is wrong with this statement. However, in brief, it completely glosses over the political, economic and social context of what he is calling Islamic extremism. It also lacks historical perspective - he presumably has in mind the Sep 11 perpetrators, and regards their behaviour as being somehow typical of traditional Islamic values rather than recognising it as a modern problem arising out of modern issues. In fact, as one historian has observed, one of the most notable features of traditional Islamic civilisation was that, unlike western Europe, new ideas were not immediately used for military purposes. This is a relatively throwaway remark in Martin Rees's book, and I wouldn't make so much of it, if it were not that it reflects a more general point about the kind of analysis he presents. This is that I regard history as a saga of human relationships, i.e. as a politico-socio-economic phenomenon. My own research and reading suggests that the ups and downs of history comprise a politico-socio-economic dynamic and are not simply driven by natural disaster or technological change. E.g. Rome was attacked by barbarians virtually from the day that it was founded, and if in 476 the barbarians finally put an end to the western empire it was only because Roman society was by that time already sick and rotten. Similarly, while some techno-disaster, as described by Martin Rees, could trigger the collapse of global civilisation some time in the next century or the one after, we need to recognise that this would not be occurring to a civilisation that was essentially healthy but rather to one that was ripe for destruction. Techno-disasters will happen (e.g. the

American dust bowl) but they only pose a threat when your society has lost its resilience (e.g. the US bounced back from its problems in the 30s). Obviously Martin Rees did not set out to write about the political, economic and social problems facing global society, so this is not a criticism of his book, but to me those issues are more interesting and more fundamental than the precise nature of the straw - nuclear war, meteor impact, bio-plague - that breaks the camel's back. THE COMING DARK AGE Newsletter October, 2004 1. INTRODUCTION This month's newsletter discusses the way that setbacks occur on all temporal and spatial scales in complex evolving systems, not just social systems but also biological and physical systems. Past editions of the newsletter are at the following address: http://www.darkage.fsnet.co.uk/Newsletter.htm I welcome all comments, suggestions and contributions, especially the latter. Please forward this newsletter to anyone you think might be interested. Marc Widdowson 2. ROME AND THE DINOSAURS Recent articles in the scientific press have concerned new theories about that hoary old chestnut, the demise of the dinosaurs. In the early 1990s, the suggestion that the dinosaurs had been wiped out by a meteorite impact began to gain acceptance. The evidence consisted of a high concentration of iodine at the geological Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary, which supposedly pointed to some kind of impact event, plus the existence of a meteorite crater of the right size and age in the Gulf of Mexico. However, some scientists disagreed. Rival theories included the idea that the extinction was linked to the prolonged volcanic activity that laid down India's so-called Deccan traps, the idea that dinosaurs had been wiped out by disease, the idea that it was the result of climate change, and the idea that the dinosaurs simply lost out to more efficient creatures i.e. the mammals. Most recently, University of Colorado physicist, Brian Toon, has added a further twist to the meteorite impact theory, arguing that it would have created such a high level of lethal radiation that the dinosaurs would simply have been burnt to a cinder. Meanwhile, he has been opposed by other scientists who point out that the dates calculated for the meteorite and the dates for the disappearance of the dinosaurs are in disagreement by something like half a million years (the death of the dinosaurs coming later). Paleontologists have also shown that the demise of the dinosaurs was no sudden event, and that their branch of the animal kingdom had actually been in decline for millions of years before the Cretaceous-Tertiary cut-off. This proliferation of competing theories for the dinosaur extinction has parallels with the proliferation of theories for events in human history, such as the disappearance of the Roman empire (explained by everything from bad plumbing to barbarian

invasion). In both cases there is a similar conclusion to be drawn - all the theories are partly correct, and none of them has a monopoly on the truth. The fall of Rome was not due to one single cause. Rome had many problems and it was their interaction and the way that they compounded each other which ensured that the empire was doomed to failure. Similarly, with the dinosaurs, meteorite impacts, volcanic eruptions, climate change and competition from other lifeforms may have all been part of the mix. The dinosaurs could probably have survived any one of these things in isolation. It was their combined effect that proved so devastating. There is a further point, which is that problems and disasters are always happening to complex systems, whether it be biological systems or socio-historical systems. These can have effects that range continuously from the mild up to the truly catastrophic. The catastrophic incidents do not need any special explanation they are simply part of this overall continuum. What one observes is that the larger the event, the more rarely it occurs. Nevertheless, the large events are due to the same general background of knocks and insults that cause the much more frequent minor events. This largely connects with the theory of 'self-organised criticality', developed by the physicist Per Bak (for a popular exposition see his book "How Nature Works" and/or the book "Ubiquity" by science journalist Mark Buchanan). According to this theory, the large disasters are not necessarily caused by large knocks. Whether a particular knock has a large or a small effect depends on the configuration of the system at the given time. It is a bit like the childhood game of 'boxes' - where you draw a grid of dots on a piece of paper and you and your opponent take turns joining the dots, with the aim being to enclose the largest number of boxes. Sometimes your opponent's move allows you to complete just one or two boxes, but sometimes it unleashes a chain reaction that allows you to fill in a large area of boxes. The input is always the same - drawing one line at a time - but the output can vary enormously depending on the configuration of the system. The theory of self-organised criticality goes beyond this simple observation to assert that a complex system tends naturally to evolve to this critical state where events of any magnitude can occur, and that there is a particular mathematical relation between the size of the event and its frequency of occurrence. When you hear anyone offering a simple explanation of some natural or historical phenomenon, therefore, be very suspicious. Such explanations can seem satisfying, but there are often problems with them, as indicated by the existence of rival theories. For me, the rejection of these special theories in favour of more general, abstract theories such as that of self-organised criticality is actually more satisfying in the long run. It offers the possibility that we can understand how history works, rather than being forced to regard it as a series of random accidents. Similarly, in the natural world, the phenomenon of convergent evolution - e.g. that the eye evolved independently but along essentially the same lines in both vertebrates and molluscs - reinforces the idea that there may be a deeper logic to the evolution of the biosphere, and it is not simply a case of chance meteorite impacts. Chance plays its role, but there are more fundamental patterns that guide the process - just as chance molecular collisions determine how individual smoke particles rise from a bonfire, and yet at a suitable level of abstraction all columns of smoke look the same.

THE COMING DARK AGE Newsletter December, 2004 1. INTRODUCTION At this time of the renewal of the year, it seems appropriate to discuss the concept of the 'phoenix principle'. This month's newsletter also contains some notes about the Swedish social scientist G Esping-Andersen's theories concerning the three worlds of welfare capitalism. Past editions of the newsletter are at the following address: http://www.darkage.fsnet.co.uk/Newsletter.htm I welcome all comments, suggestions and contributions, especially the latter. Please forward this newsletter to anyone you think might be interested. Marc Widdowson 2. THE PHOENIX PRINCIPLE The phoenix principle, in its most succinct form, states: "before breakthrough, breakdown". The idea is that you have to destroy the old in order to create the new. When you have gone down a blind alley, you have to move backward before you can move forward again. This is the way history works. For example, the invention of the motor car caused problems for horsing interests, ranging from the people who bred and marketed horses, to the people who made a living out of stabling and providing horse fodder, to the people who swept up horse manure from the street and sold it as fuel or fertiliser. In the long run, the motor car generated far more jobs than it removed, but one industry had to be destroyed for the other to be created. There are some who ask why it has to be this way. Why cannot industries and social institutions evolve smoothly in the direction of ever greater improvement? Why does it have to involve destruction as well as creation? To some extent this question is beyond the bounds of dark age theory. Dark age theory is solely concerned with describing the way that history actually is, not with why it happens to be that way. We may note, however, that the phoenix principle, or the principle of creative destruction, is not something that comes into play only rarely. It is always operating around us, though for most of the time on a small scale so that we don't notice it. Businesses are always going bust. People are always losing their jobs and having to find new ones. Life itself is characterised by the experience of setback and recovery. Is it realistic to ask that this should never happen? That everything should always progress smoothly? If there can be small setbacks, there can also be medium setbacks and large setbacks. The larger they are, the more rarely they occur. The phoenix principle is not just found in history. It seems to be inherent to all complex evolving systems. The classic example is the forest fire. Over time, the forest becomes clogged with deadwood and with a dense undergrowth that prevents the shoots of new trees from springing up. The forest fire clears this all away and thereby allows the forest to renew itself. A similar thing is seen in the flash floods that affect rivers and seem to do so much damage.

While the river is flowing along at its normal rate it becomes clogged with stones, logs and other debris. The flash flood scours out the river bed, getting rid of all this matter, and allowing the river to flow smoothly again. After the Colorado river was dammed, scientists observed that the river's ecology was being harmed because flash floods could no longer occur. As a result, they instituted a policy of occasionally releasing large amounts of water in order to simulate floods and keep the river healthy. The phoenix principle also seems to operate in biological evolution. Species are going extinct all the time, but now and again whole groups of species go extinct at roughly the same time, and very occasionally - at intervals of up to a hundred million years - there are massive extinction events, completely transforming the nature of life on earth. The latter have often been attributed to special shocks, especially geological catastrophes. The theory that the dinosaurs were wiped out by a meteorite, for example, is well known. That theory, initially controversial, gained in acceptability throughout the 1990s. However, some recent work suggests that it may not be a good explanation after all. The dinosaur die-off seems to have begun a considerable time before the meteorite impact, and to have continued for a considerable time afterwards. It would be nice to believe that the meteorite impact theory is a red herring, and that the extinction of the dinosaurs is simply one of the most extreme events within a continuum of extinction events ranging from individual species upwards. It would be nice to believe that, because it means that the chaotic dynamic of evolutionary progress can be understood as an inherently logical process. Usually, when a species goes extinct, nothing else happens. Sometimes, however, that can cause problems for other species that used to eat the species which has gone extinct, and they may also go extinct. Occasionally, that can cause problems for other species and very rarely, when conditions happen to be just right, whole ecological webs may unravel in a domino effect. (This is all neatly modelled by the theory of selforganised criticality, which I won't go into here.) The point is that the major extinctions and the minor extinctions are seen to be products of basically the same phenomenon, and we do not need to introduce arbitrary and ad hoc disasters in order to explain them. Similarly, the phoenix principle applied to history means that history is characterised by an underlying pattern. There is a logic to it, and it is not simply one damn thing after another. This is relevant to the recent disaster in the Indian Ocean. Dreadful though it is, this disaster is not really critical to the historical, dark age processes that affect global society. Society has its own logic, and evolves under its own steam. Society is not simply buffeted one way or the other by natural disasters, however extreme. Indeed, there have always been natural disasters, and there always will be, and they simply form a constant backdrop to human experience. Dark ages are to be explained in terms of social processes and human relationships, not by random geological events. Meanwhile, the very legend of the phoenix shows that people have long recognised the existence of the phoenix principle, which operates not only in history but also in many kinds of natural system. This concept is also

expressed in the notion of the dying-and-rising god, which was found in ancient Egypt and today in Christianity. That concept seems particularly to be associated with agricultural peoples, who experience it in the farming cycle, whereby the crops grow up, flourish and are then cut down, leaving the fields bare, for a new crop to be sown. The same cycle of death and re-birth is the result of finite human lifetimes. It is also found in astronomical phenomena, such as the waxing and waning of the moon, and the yearly oscillation between summer and winter solstices. If some cosmological theories are correct, it may affect the universe as a whole, which grows old and is then reborn in a fiery cataclysm. The phoenix principle is thus one of the most fundamental principles of all nature. 3. THREE WORLDS OF WELFARE CAPITALISM Three worlds of welfare capitalism - three different routes to economic unravelling? The Swedish political scientist Esping-Andersen (Esping-Andersen, G.: The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism, Cambridge 1990) has classified the universe of welfare institutions in the Western world into three large categories: a) liberal wfs (US, UK, NZ, AUS) b) conservative wfs (D, I, F, NL,) c) social-democratic wfs (Scandinavian countries) LIBERAL. The liberal welfare state is set up to prevent poverty. This goal is being achieved through means-tested provisions and the private welfare industry. Family policy is, as a rule, virtually absent, and childcare only available to the middle class. Labour market stratification: The labour market is characterised by the large number of "junk jobs", relatively low unemployment. At the same time there is the problem of the working-poor. The liberal welfare state has higher wealth differentials than the two other models. Other principal features are the high employment rate of women and comparatively high fertility rates (work-family-nexus). CONSERVATIVE. The conservative welfare state, inspired by catholic social doctrine and paternalism has traditionally aimed at preserving the different societal segments' status while making sure that the threat posed by socialism got no chance. Benefits are contributory and differentiated (originally, only the strategically important coal and metal workers received pensions in Bismarckian Germany), and there is a reliance on cash benefits rather than services. Labour market stratification: As wages are artificially inflated, there is less potential for job creation at the lower end. Furthermore more women opt to stay out of work than in the liberal system as there appears to be a trade-off between family and work (benefits are not intended to reconcile this conflict); fertility rates are low (work-family-nexus). SOCIAL-DEMOCRATC. The social-democratic welfare state is formed around the values of equality and solidarity. Accordingly, the policy outcome is the most redistributive of all systems. Benefits are ideally universal and taxfunded and there is strong emphasis on services (especially child-care). In addition, training and education have been a top priority in states

undertaking an active labour-market policy. Labour market stratification: Of all systems, the Nordic welfare state probably has the highest rate of female employment. Secondly, many jobs were created in the public sector. Investment in child care may have resulted in comparatively high fertility rates (work-family-nexus). While the lean liberal welfare state enjoys public support, there is the danger of an ever-growing class of working-poors, crime and social disorder as lowcost jobs are being mercilessly offshored to Asia and elsewhere. The conservative welfare state is said to be a "world of welfare without work". In addition to unemployment, sustainability is a crucial issue, also since immigration as a solution to the problem is not welcome with everyone in rather conservative societies (Germany, Italy). The egalitarian socialdemocratic welfare states avoided both poverty and high unemployment rates by accumulating deficits in the public sector. Trilemma: subsistence earnings - full employment - balanced budget Four challenges for the welfare state: 1. globalisation: a) Mobile capital and production facilities, globalisation of finance services (pensions?) -> state loses control over income source b) mass immigration: potential solution to demographic problem but also appears to be a burden for the wfs 2. post industrial economy: a) less scope for productivity b) growing wealth differentials 3. demographic change Population ageing: 3 key variables (fertility rate, life expectancy, immigration) 4 work (?) Female employment; trade-off between work and family (?) The welfare state and the CDA - Fundamental problem: systems of public welfare = tragedy of commons overall needs and demands are growing faster than delivery capacity: disorganisation - Conservative systems appear to be stuck. Nordic nations with highly-skilled labour force and more egalitarian, homogenous societies may be better off, but in the long term all of them are doomed to fail. - "Globalisation" (growth of scale) = catalyst: Competition from rising nations forces retrenchment, mass immigration raises pressure - demands of national clienteles (voters): retrenchment can only be minimal/gradual -> contradiction: no fundamental change until radical collapse of system; in meantime gradual impoverishment of large segments of population - On the other hand: modernisation will lead to similar problems in China

(one-child-policy); "equilibrium"? - Surprises? Innovations leading to new industries and with potential for growth <-> "robotic revolution"?, static and anti-scientific anti-enterpreneurial climate THE COMING DARK AGE Newsletter January, 2005 1. INTRODUCTION This month's newsletter has been stimulated by Jared Diamond's new book "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive". It contains some observations on the environment and collapse. Past editions of the newsletter are at the following address: http://www.darkage.fsnet.co.uk/Newsletter.htm. I welcome all comments, suggestions and contributions, especially the latter. Please forward this newsletter to anyone you think might be interested. Marc Widdowson 2. SOCIAL COLLAPSE AND THE ENVIRONMENT I have enjoyed Jared Diamond's books in the past. In his new one (Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive) he explains societal collapse in terms of environmental factors. However, it seems to be one step beyond the usual environmental determinism. My view has always been that the significant issue is not that the environment changed, but that the society failed to take it in its stride - in other words, environmental change (which is always happening) does not explain collapse, and instead we need to look at what was going on inside the society. Diamond seems to be arguing something like this with his idea that some societies 'choose' collapse in the face of environmental factors, while others take steps and avoid it. However, I would say that such a thesis is still too narrow, and wrong to privilege the environment as the key influence. Did the British empire disappear because of environmental change? Some people might be able to construct an argument along those lines, just as someone once traced the rise of Hitler back to a decline of the Baltic herring population. But surely there are other lines of argument that have nothing to do with the environment, such as the way that the technological and institutional differential dividing the Victorians from African tribesmen was quickly eroded by colonial contact, or the rise of global mass media and its exploitation by Gandhi. If you look at the fall of the Roman empire, some have attributed this to environmental factors of one kind or another (a comet impact put dust into the atmosphere, causing disease and poor harvests; or cooler, drier weather on the Asian steppes pushed the Huns onto the Goths and Vandals who in turn irrupted into the empire). But there is a whole range of other theories - e.g. Gibbon blamed the pernicious influence of clericalism, to name just one. Diamond might say (if he were to consider the topic) that Christian clericalism was one of the things that sapped the Roman ability to confront environmental change (e.g. it engendered fatalism as people were preparing for the end of the world anyway). However, you would have to bring in other things, like the bloated bureaucracy, the oppressive tax system, and the erosion of differentials

between Romans and barbarians after centuries of using them in the Roman army, all of which also encouraged Rome to 'choose' collapse. You thereby leave the environment behind and the real explanation is seen to lie in the social mechanisms that produced clericalism, bureaucracy, over-taxation, use of barbarian mercenaries etc. After all, it is not as though these things only acted at a particular moment of crisis. They represented trends that emerged over centuries. To be fair, I think Diamond is saying that societies create the environmental problems which bring them down, so I would agree to the extent that societies evolve under their own steam, by some inner logic, and are not simply buffeted by external factors. However, I would say that they create a whole lot of other problems for themselves, most of which are sociological. Meanwhile, the fact that there are so many possible explanations for any given example of decline is itself a clue to what is going on. History is chicken-and-egg, not cause-and-effect like the natural sciences. The precise chain of events that caused particular societies to rise and fall can probably never be unravelled. What can be said is that there are certain patterns - of vicious and virtuous circles, of self-defeating logics - that may be discerned widely throughout history, largely because they are in fact characteristic of all complex, evolving systems. It is pointless to worry about the precise sequence of molecular movements that led to a particular storm. What we need is to be able to recognise what a storm looks like, especially when we see one approaching. Furthermore, we should not think in terms of the rise and fall of discrete societies, but of a seamless ferment in which social collapse is just one extreme of a continuum. I believe Diamond might be sympathetic to such points, but I'm not sure he has taken them fully on board. Turning to the present, Diamond's thesis seems to be that our own civilisation is compromising its environment (an idea that could be disputed), and that we also face a choice: change our behaviour and avert disaster, or press on regardless to the ultimate catastrophe. Yet we know that there are many other issues facing our civilisation, some of which have the qualities of impasse. For example, what about the fact that our very wealth and stability is attracting migrants, who as their numbers grow find increasingly less need to adapt and are changing our society from within - so that our civilisation becomes the victim of its own success? Wouldn't that be true whatever might be happening to the environment? And is it not the sort of thing for which the cure might be worse than the disease? And why should we really worry about it? Aren't we descended from the people who once did exactly that to ancient Rome? Diamond's proposed solution, of course, seems to be: throttle back (regulate, intervene) and opt for a kind of benign stagnation (what advocates of this approach might call 'equilibrium' and 'sustainability')? It is not to allow industrial and technological growth to continue unfettered, so that human capabilities expand and we move towards becoming a so-called Kardashev 1 civilisation (one that can control the resources of an entire planet, and for which the problem of managing the global environment is trivial)? Diamond's attitude to the global "population crisis" is indicative. He sees human population growth as a threat to the planet. He acknowledges that this growth is slowing down, and he sees that as a positive thing, but he remarks that it may be too little too late. Diamond therefore does not seem alert to the dark age principle that population growth is the sign of a vigorous society, and that the very fact that population growth is tailing off shows that global

civilisation is stagnating. After all, there was a population explosion at the time of the neolithic revolution, the introduction of farming. This was not a problem or a threat to the planet. It simply showed that the invention of agriculture had allowed a large expansion in the human ecological niche. Similarly, the population explosion of the last few hundred years can be traced to the gains of the industrial revolution. It is the termination of that population explosion which shows our society has a problem and the present world order is running out of steam. Incidentally, 'The Collapse of Complex Societies' by the archaeologist Joseph Tainter (CUP, 1988) argued that societies collapse because of diminishing marginal returns, and he used all the same examples that Diamond uses. This seems to illustrate the point that collapse is multifarious, and that different people can read it in different ways, so that in one sense they are all correct, but they also miss the fundamental nature of the phenomenon (i.e., to start with, that it is multifarious). THE COMING DARK AGE Newsletter February, 2005

1. INTRODUCTION This month's newsletter (slightly late) describes the syndrome of decline in classical Greece. Some aspects may strike a chord. Past editions of the newsletter are at the following address: http://www.darkage.fsnet.co.uk/Newsletter.htm I welcome all comments, suggestions and contributions, especially the latter. Please forward this newsletter to anyone you think might be interested. Marc Widdowson 2. THE DECLINE OF CLASSICAL GREECE Today, the civilisation of classical Greece is considered a point of departure for all western politics, philosophy, mathematics, science, literature and historiography. It was, depending on your definition, responsible for five of the Seven Wonders of the World. The point is arguable because some of them were put up during the Hellenic era, when the classical city states-Athens, Sparta, Corinth etc.-had been incorporated in the empire of father Philip of Macedon and his son Alexander the Great. It would be convenient if societies rose and fell in a simple manner, so that we could say Greek civilisation started here and stopped there. Unfortunately, history is never that neat. Classical Greece was on the one hand terminated through being conquered by the Macedonians but was on the other hand granted a new lease of life as the Macedonians spread Greek culture through the empire they conquered from Egypt to Pakistan. However, we are jumping over more than a millennium of history. Let us go back to the beginning. Classical Greek civilisation emerged out of the four-hundred-year dark age that followed the destruction of Mycenae (c. 1100 BC). It did not represent a recovery of Mycenaean civilisation, but was something new, created by the immigrants

who arrived during the centuries leading up to and immediately after the Mycenaean collapse. It was about 700 BC that writing returned, cities were rebuilt and trade began to pick up. The early Greeks had a sense of inferiority relative to the past, as if recognising themselves as the barbarians who had once brought down a great civilisation. The poet Hesiod (c. 700 BC) wrote of humanity's descent from golden and silver ages, via the bronze age, to the degraded iron age of his own time. Yet whereas the 'terrible coming of iron' had indeed contributed to the downfall of bronze age civilisation, the new order was bringing this military technology under control. Quite simply, the development of fighting techniques and social institutions to tame the effects of iron-based warfare was a sine qua non for the dark age to end. These early Greeks made effective troops, and served as mercenaries in the Egyptian army. We think of the Greeks as artists and above all thinkers. However, this was the achievement of later generations, only made possible by the down-to-earth activities of the new civilisation's founders. For, in addition to military prowess, the earlier Greeks had a reputation for being shrewd and energetic entrepreneurs. They founded merchant colonies from southern Italy to the Black Sea and acted as intermediaries serving both the venerable civilisations of the east and the developing regions of the western and northern Mediterranean. Around 400 BC there was a shield-making factory at Athens employing a hundred and twenty people, and the Greeks made considerable progress in commercial and banking techniques necessary to underpin international trade. Without this Greek talent for making money, there would never have been any Parthenon or the other architectural marvels. The western conceit that everything began with the Greeks can probably be traced to the Romans, who took much of what they knew about the arts of civilisation from Greece. In the second century BC, the Roman statesman Cato the Elder complained bitterly about the extent of Rome's borrowings from Greece. Yet ascendant civilisations always borrow, there is no shame in that. Had societies not stood on each other's shoulders, humanity would not have got as far as it has. The Greeks certainly learnt much from their predecessors. They copied the alphabet, for example, from the Phoenicians, but they made it their own and turned it into something new. Similarly, Pythagoras's theorem was known in Babylon 1200 years before Pythagoras was born, but the Greeks incorporated it into a new systematised form of geometry based on axioms and deductive proof. The ancient Iraqis knew how to calculate the square root of two to an accuracy of one part in a million, but it was the ancient Greeks who realised that this quantity could not be represented by a fraction and thereby discovered the so-called transcendental numbers. Most of the great scholars of Greece would visit Egypt to complete their educations. Solon, who later became famous as the great Athenian lawgiver, spent a decade there before returning to reform the constitution of his native city at the start of the sixth century BC. While he was in Egypt, one of his tutors gently chided him, "Solon, Solon, you Greeks are like children. There are no old men in Greece." The Egyptians must have seen little threat from these brash foreigners who came to study, to fight for the Egyptian army, or simply to make money in the Egyptian economy. One day, though, they would find themselves under the rule of Greek-speaking

pharaohs. Throughout the classical era, Greece was divided into numerous city states. They saw themselves as having a common culture, and they formed themselves into various leagues, but they were never united under one leader. The history of the period is one of individual states jostling for position. Nevertheless, their divisions and conflicts did not prevent them from making a lasting contribution to world civilisation, and may even have stimulated it. At the beginning of the fifth century BC, the Greeks showed their talent for military innovation when they overcame the numerically superior armies of the Persian Empire. The Persians may have a better claim even than the Romans to have built the greatest empire of antiquity, in terms of both organisation and extent. To this day, Iran is a giant country, larger than the entire European Union. The Persians first attacked Greece in 490 BC, after the Greek-speaking cities of Asia Minor, which were then under Persian domination, had staged a revolt with help from the mother country. The Persians were defeated in the Battle of Marathon, this being the occasion when Pheidippides ran all the way back to Athens with the news and created the legend behind the modern race (it was not part of the ancient Olympics). At Marathon, thanks to superior Greek tactics, over 6000 Persians were killed for a mere 192 Greek lives. Ten years later, the Persians were back, under their new king, Xerxes. His army consisted of a hundred thousand men, comparable to the one that landed in Normandy on D-Day 1944. It included Indians and East Africans, alongside Xerxes' own troops. With the Persians approaching, the Athenians consulted the Delphic Oracle. They were told that "the wooden wall only shall not fall." Some argued that this referred to the hedge that had once encircled the Acropolis, and meant that, while the Acropolis might be saved, the rest of Athens would be destroyed. They suggested abandoning the city to the Persians and fleeing en masse. However, another group argued that the "wooden wall" meant the navy, and they urged a crash programme to build more ships. This opinion prevailed, and a few months later the Greek and Persian fleets came face to face at the Battle of Salamis (480 BC). Despite being outnumbered nearly three to one, the Greeks again thrashed the Persians by a series of daring manoeuvres. Xerxes trudged home, never to bother the Greeks again. The prominent role played by Athens in defeating Persia made it look increasingly like a rival to Sparta, which had long been used to a dominant position among the city states. This rivalry finally broke down in the Peloponnesian War of 431 to 404 BC, in which Athens was defeated. Thucydides, an Athenian who fought in the war and wrote its history, said that though people referred to many particular reasons why the war broke out, the fundamental reason was "the growing power of Athens, and the fear this produced in Sparta." He thereby put his finger on a syndrome of universal significance. The time when a new player is rising on the international stage is always a dangerous one. The thrusting ambition of the up-and-coming power collides with the efforts of more established powers to keep the status quo, and that often leads to war. Like Germany or Japan after World War Two, Athens bounced back from its defeat in the Peloponnesian War and, for the next fifty years, resumed the commercial growth that had helped to precipitate the original crisis. This was also a period of great intellectual advance. Socrates, his pupil Plato, and Plato's pupil Aristotle all lived during this time. At the same time, there was a new power emerging in the rough hinterland to the north of Greece. This was

the kingdom of the Macedonians who, for most of Greek history, had been a primitive and distinctly unpromising people, useful primarily as a source of mercenaries. There was no reason to suspect they might be capable of anything very much. The Greeks happily taught them their technological and military secrets, for they assumed that the Macedonians knew their place in the order of things. In 359 BC, Philip of Macedon came to the throne, and introduced the most effective military formation the world had yet seen-the Macedonian phalanx. The phalanx was originally a Greek invention-the interleaved rows and columns of men protected by shields and trained to turn instantly in any direction, so that they always presented the enemy with an uncompromising wall of metal-but Philip took it to a new level of efficiency. Long pikes poked out between the ranks, capable of engaging the opposing troops with near impunity. Cavalry and lighter armed troops harassed the enemy as the heavy, deadly, slow-moving phalanx moved in. With these tactics, the Macedonians conquered the northern part of the Greek peninsula and brought the other city states under their indirect control. Philip hired the forty two year old Aristotle as tutor for his son Alexander, who, within six years, had succeeded to the kingship. Alexander now embarked on the most rapid campaign of conquest in the entire history of the world, before or since. He began with the Persian Empire, which since the days of Xerxes had seen a bloody struggle for the throne, as kings murdered their own sons and were in turn assassinated by army generals or ambitious princes and royal brothers. The government was in the hands of the court eunuchs and their network of spies. The state's resources were lavished on palaces, ceremonial and a burgeoning bureaucracy, while the people were treated as slaves and subject at any time to arbitrary arrest, confiscation of property or execution. Such a society, run on fear, fell easily to Alexander's onslaught. The Persian Royal Road, connecting the Mediterranean world to the imperial capital at Susa, had inns for travellers every fifteen miles, between which relays carried mail at the rate of a horse's gallop. Private letters might be sent but were read by officials for security reasons. This transport and communications system helped the Persians to administer their far-flung empire. It also helped Alexander to conquer it. When he died in Babylon at the age of 33, Alexander's empire encompassed Greece, Egypt, the Middle East and Central Asia. It promptly fell apart into those four regions, each under Hellenic kings of basically Greek language and culture. It is tempting to think that the downfall of the Persian Empire at the hands of once obscure neighbours is explained by its totalitarian institutions and has no relevance for today's democratic nations. However, the distinctly democratic states of classical Greece also fell to the Macedonian onslaught. Indeed, Plato associated democratic ideas with decline. He regarded democracy as a miserable form of government that compared unfavourably with the great nations of his time. There was nothing democratic about Alexander the Great. He was a man of violence, who once killed his best friend in a drunken brawl. Athens has been hailed as the birthplace of democracy, although there seems to have been a form of representative government in the earliest cities of Iraq. At any rate, Athens started off as a monarchy, but royal power was gradually curtailed and in 683 BC the kingship was replaced by so-called archons, who were officials elected by the aristocracy. Over the next century, peasant revolts and the growing prosperity of the middle class produced a demand for

wider political participation until, in 594, Solon was appointed to devise a new constitution. The main effect of Solon's reforms was to emancipate the working class. Peasants were no longer tied to their landlords and instead became free to run their own lives. The aristocracy still had the upper hand, since only those who owned property were allowed to vote, but limits were set to their power. People's rights were protected by the courts, to which everyone now had access. Solon's constitution turned out to be not the final word but just another step in the continuing evolution of Athenian democracy. Power increasingly devolved to the ordinary citizen. By the middle of the fifth century BC, all Athenians were considered equal in terms of rights, and even the lowest class had acquired the vote and was allowed to run for the chief offices of state. A hundred years later, rights to participate in the assembly, and presumably to vote, were extended to women, foreigners and even slaves. There were also reforms in other areas. Torture was abolished, for example, and those convicted of capital crimes were to be poisoned by drinking a cup of hemlock, considered a more humane form of execution. Per diem expenses were introduced for those fulfilling government posts and serving on tribunals, so that everyone, not just the rich, could afford to participate. The democratic system did not commend itself to Plato in part because of its seeming inefficiency and inability to take decisive action, and in part because it provided an arena for ambition and corruption that opposed rather than promoted wise rule. There was also the way that it tended to encourage the lowest common denominator. At one time, paideia, or education, was recognised to be the hallmark of a civilised person. To possess paideia was to possess manners, culture and sophistication. Yet as time went on, such elitist values were scorned. Contemporary commentators lamented that ignorance and vulgarity were no longer a cause for embarrassment. In the Athenian heyday, youths swore an oath at the age of eighteen, stating 'I will hand on my fatherland, not diminished but larger and better'. Such uncritical loyalty came to seem ridiculous, and the practice was abandoned. As democracy widened, the sense of civic duty shrank. The courts were increasingly busy pursuing people for their contributions to the public pursesomething that had been unthinkable in earlier times, when people gave freely and willingly. Volunteers stopped coming forward to serve in the armed forces. Conscription had to be introduced and the Greeks, who had once served as mercenaries for other decaying civilisations, now turned to using mercenaries themselves. As the threat from Macedon loomed on the horizon, the great orator Demosthenes, called for a significant build-up of the armed forces, but his fellow Athenians voted for subsidised theatre performances. Demosthenes also castigated the conspicuous consumption of the rich, who retreated into their ever more opulent houses for a life of luxury. Meanwhile, ordinary citizens did little work and preferred to eke out a meagre existence on the fees they got for attending tribunals. The gap between rich and poor, which had shrunk during the sixth century BC, began to grow again. It is important to remember that the energetic entrepreneurs of early Greece and the parasitic idlers of later times were not the same people. The later generations were the many times great grandchildren of those who had been the founders of Greece's wealth. They grew up regarding their society's affluence as natural and something to be enjoyed. They had little notion of the efforts that made it possible, let alone the motivation to repeat them.

Cultural attitudes shifted away from conformity and in favour of individual expression. It has been said that the later Greeks became interested in men not Man, and indeed in women not Woman. The idealised female figures of former times gave way to portraits of real women, in which they appeared as sexual figures or as realistically flawed. In art and literature of the fourth century BC, prostitutes, criminals, and street urchins came to be of greater fascination than the old heroes. Where mortals had once been depicted like gods, the gods were now depicted like mortals. Playwrights turned away from the great political and philosophical questions, in favour of entertainment that was based on everyday reality and the problems of domestic life. Classical Greece is known for nothing if not philosophy, and here the changing attitudes can be readily traced. There was a growing call for toleration and against moral absolutism. Truth and justice were presented as relative with no built-in validity. Socrates was among the first to argue along these lines, as he pointed out that there could be no unambiguous definition of what was virtuous and claimed that his city's traditional values had no logic. He was put to death in 399 BC, after the Athenian defeat in the Peloponnesian war, on the grounds that his nihilist teaching was corrupting the city's youth. The execution of Socrates has gone down in history as a crime against reason, but some might think his accusers had a point. This was a time of social crisis, when, for example, the worship of the city's gods was being neglected and Athenian self-confidence was at rock bottom. Socrates deliberately provoked the judges, and brushed aside all attempts to give him a way out. He finally made a martyr of himself by taking the cup of hemlock. The fate of Socrates in no way diminished the attractiveness of his ideas, but more likely increased it. Within decades, the Cynic school was arguing for the complete freedom and self-sufficiency of the individual, and advanced the notion that individuals owe loyalty only to themselves and not to the community. Its founder, Diogenes, declared that he was a citizen of no state, expressed contempt for patriotism, and asserted the naturalness of sexual activity by masturbating in public. He said that "what is natural cannot be dishonest or indecent and therefore can and should be done in public," by which he justified his habit of defecating in the street. He had no time for the thought that other people might prefer to be spared intimacy with his bodily functions. The Stoic school represents an alternative reaction to the crumbling moral order of late classical Greece. Stoicism emphasised a resigned attitude to the difficulties of life and the need to maintain personal standards of conduct in an imperfect world. It was still an individualist philosophy, but it came to a different conclusion, advocating forbearance rather than self-indulgence. The point was to recognise that the world was evil, to give up hope of changing or challenging that evil, and instead to concentrate on not adding to the evil there already was. Though admirable in its way, this philosophy bore little trace of the verve and can-do spirit that once brought Greece out of its post-Mycenaean dark age. It did, however, provide solace to those who felt bewildered by the egotistic and ignoble times in which they lived. It is no coincidence that Stoicism became popular again centuries later in Rome, as the empire's troubles were mounting. At the time that the Greeks were making a heroic stand in the Persian Wars, Rome was just an obscure town on the Tiber. Even those Greeks who had heard of it would never have thought it could pose a danger to the cities that turned

back Xerxes' great army. Yet in 146 BC, after defeating the Macedonians in a series of battles, the legions occupied the Greek peninsula and turned it into a Roman province. For later Roman administrators, Greece was a ghastly hole, and they avoided getting posted there if they could possibly help it. THE COMING DARK AGE Newsletter March, 2005 1. INTRODUCTION This month's newsletter describes how the Roman Empire became Christian, and presents some notes on Martin Van Crefeld's book, 'The Transformation of War'. Past editions of the newsletter are at the following address: http://www.darkage.fsnet.co.uk/Newsletter.htm I welcome all comments, suggestions and contributions, especially the latter. Please forward this newsletter to anyone you think might be interested. Marc Widdowson 2. THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND THE ROMAN EMPIRE The tendency for later Roman citizens to turn away from their own culture was nowhere more evident than in the rise of Christianity. This was a religion imported from the land of the Jews, which gained its converts among slaves and foreigners. It was most un-Roman, and this very fact made it desirable to Romans of all classes. The enthusiasm for Christianity was part of a broader drive for self-realisation. Rome's traditional religion was an essentially civic matter, in which public officials officiated at ceremonies involving the whole community. By becoming Christians, people were making a personal choice and expressing their separation from the mainstream. Christians lived in Roman society, but their loyalties lay elsewhere. In his book 'City of God', Saint Augustine of Hippo wrote "Please pardon us if our country, up above, has to cause trouble to yours." In fact, Christianity was just one of many alternative belief systems that were then spreading through the Roman Empire to divisive effect. These included Gnosticism, Stoicism, Neo-Platonism, Mithraism, Hindu mysticism, Isis worship and the cults of the Manichaeans and Neo-Pythagoreans. Many of these were further fragmented into numerous sects, often at each other's throats. There was also renewed interest in magic, and the wearing of amulets, for example, became widespread. Rome's social fabric was being torn apart. It was hardly surprising that the imperial state tried to fight back by banning these corrosive influences and prosecuting their adherents. During Nero's persecutions of the first century, Christians were famously thrown to the lions-a standard method of executing criminals, which is what Christians were considered to be. In the second century, while Christianity remained banned, there was a new atmosphere of toleration. When the emperor Trajan was asked by one of his provincial governors whether he

should prosecute Christians whose names were being submitted to him in anonymous letters, the emperor replied, "That is not how we do things in this day and age." Under less enlightened authorities, the Christians could still be regarded as scapegoats for the empire's troubles. At Lyons in the 170s, Christians were publicly tortured and, according to Bishop Eusebius (c. 300), finished off with "the iron chair, which roasted their flesh and suffocated them with the reek." Yet Christianity thrived on such treatment. It proved futile banning people from expressing their religion, not least because Christians actively sought to become martyrs, since they thought it would speed them to eternal life. At the beginning of the fourth century, the reforming emperor Diocletian instituted a new wave of persecutions as part of a general campaign to revive the empire. The third century had been a time of crisis all round. Under the weight of the dole and a groaning bureaucracy, taxes had reached almost unbearable levels. Government salaries had been cut back, and civil servants now eked out their pay with bribes. While the police seemed to be losing the battle with criminals, new laws poured out of the imperial court. Despite ever more severe penalties, such as chopping off the hands of thieves, this legislation had little effect (although much of it would later be adopted in the Islamic world). All along its over-stretched frontier, the empire was harassed by raiders and pirates, and it was drawn into a chronic series of small wars. In some provinces, fed up with over-taxation, insecurity, corruption and crime, so-called 'bacaudae' threw out the Roman officials and set up independent communes. By all logic, the Roman Empire should already have collapsed under the burden of its third century problems. Yet Diocletian's reforms, which included dividing the empire between four rulers, seemed to pull it back from the brink. Nevertheless, he did not succeed in suppressing the Christians, and thirty years later, Constantine the Great made an even more radical move. Instead of trying to stamp out Christianity, he declared it to be the empire's official religion. It was now the pagans who found themselves hounded and out of kilter with the times. The Altar of Victory, which Julius Caesar had installed in the Senate as a symbol of Roman supremacy and on which senators used to swear an oath to uphold the empire, was removed as idolatrous. Q Aurelius Symmachus, a senator and pagan, pleaded for the altar to be returned, saying that while he had no wish to offend the Christians who now dominated the government, surely this one tradition could be preserved. His request was denied. In Alexandria the local bishop railed against the famous library, the ancient world's premier storehouse of human knowledge. His complaint was that the texts were almost exclusively of pagan origin. In AD 391, a mob of Christian extremists smashed their way into the library, destroying statues and mosaics, and setting fire to the shelves full of scrolls. The Christians were eventually dispersed and part of the library's collection was rescued. In 415, another Christian mob attacked Hypatia, the professor of philosophy, stripped her naked, stabbed her to death, and burned her body in the street.

To be fair, most mainstream bishops deplored such atrocities and advocated persuasion as a way of getting their message across. The underlying point though was to restore cultural unity by creating a Christian empire. Thirty years after Constantine, the emperor Julian, tried to restore paganism, earning himself the epithet 'the Apostate', but he was killed after a short reign. From then on all emperors were Christian. Yet even in the next century, as the end approached, powerful voices accused Christianity of ruining the empire and, after the Vandals sacked Rome, some pagan temples and sacred groves were restored. Furthermore, Christianity itself was divided by various rival doctrines concerning whether Christ was divine, human or some combination of the two. It would take the rigours of a dark age before the heresies were crushed and unity was achieved. In that process, the barbarian kings who took over from the Roman Empire were major players, for when they accepted the Christian faith, they brought their entire people with them. 3. 'THE TRANSFORMATION OF WAR' BY MARTIN VAN CREFELD "A ghost is stalking the corridors of general staffs and defense departments all over the "developed" world - the fear of military impotence, even irrelevance." The main thesis presented by Van Crefeld is that war is not a matter of the past, as some people have suggested, but will undergo a transformation. It is large-scale, conventional war that is a thing of the past. Van Crefeld argues that the political benefits from the possession of nuclear weapons are minimal. They have not prevented the US from failing in Vietnam, neither have they been able to help the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Before this, the US nuclear monopoly had not been enough to stop Russia from developing its own nuclear force. "Over the last forty-five years it would be difficult to point out even a single case when a state possessing nuclear arms was able to change the status quo by threatening their use, let alone using them." Furthermore, "the effect of nuclear weapons was to push conventional war into the nooks and crannies of the international system. ... As the small nations - e. g. Israel and her neighbors - fought each other, the superpowers stood on the sidelines." Since 1945, there have been (up to 1990) some 160 armed conflicts, three quarters of which were of so-called low-intensity. Low-intensity conflicts (LICs) share three characteristics: - They tend to unfold in the less developed parts of the world. - They rarely involve regular forces on both sides. - Most LICs do not rely primarily on high-tech weaponry. LICs have been more bloody than conventional wars. Van Crefeld uses the example of Israel. 43 percent of the 14000 dead Israel suffered in the four decades of its existence fell during the war of liberation (1948-9), which Van Crefeld sees in many ways as a LIC. "Assuming that politics is what wars are all about, then LICs have been

politically by far the most significant form of war waged since 1945. .. From South Africa to Laos, all over the Third World, LICs have been perhaps the most dominant instrument to bring about political change." For technical reasons, no first world nations have so far been forced to fight foreigners waging a LIC on their own territory. The notion that superior weaponry in itself can prevail was proven wrong in many instances (US in Lebanon, SU in Afghanistan etc.). However, the Western nations might be constrained by "democratic traditions" and "humanitariansm", which cannot be said for example for the Vietnamese in Cambodia. It might also be argued that the "conquering distance" in LICs was relatively high. Yet, in the past, this did not stop the Spanish from conquering America, for example. Moreover, proximity did not give the Vietnamese in Cambodia, the Soviets in Afghanistan or the Israelis the upper hand. "In fact, there are solid military reasons why modern regular forces are all but useless for fighting what is fast becoming the dominant form of war in our age. Perhaps the most important reason is to look after the technology on which these forces depend; between maintenance and logistics and sheer administration this ensures that the number of troops in their "tails" will be far too large and the number in the fighting "teeth" far too small." "A special chapter in the failure of conventional forces is formed by their weapon systems. ... Thus, modern weapon systems are all becoming dependent on electronics... However, the more complicated the surroundings, the greater the problems (examples: rafts installed in the Persian Gulf close to oil installations to distract Iranian missiles)" Hence, Van Crefeld notes that Israel was easily able to win complete command of the air against the Syrians in 1982, but it ultimately failed when it came to controlling the densely populated areas of Lebanon. The period in history in which war was characterised by a "trinity of government/state, army and people" is a brief one. Van Crefeld goes on to explain at length and by the means of historical examples, why the concept of trinitarian war only applies to modern times. In short, there was previously either no state, no single army or no unified people. Now trinitarian war is disappearing again. "Though decolonization is now all but complete, low-intensity conflict has not been interrupted in its march of conquest. Even today it is tearing to pieces many developing countries from Colombia to the Philippines. Much of this work is the work of ragtag bands of ruffians... Nor is there any reason to think that the comparatively small number of developed countries can continue to enjoy immunity forever. On numerous occasions in the past their embassies have been attacked, their ships hijacked, their aircraft bombed out of the sky... To make matters worse, many developed countries now contain sizeable minorities..." THE COMING DARK AGE Newsletter

April, 2005 1. INTRODUCTION This month's newsletter describes George Modelski's theory of the international state system and applies it to today's situation, especially with respect to China. Apologies that the newsletter is rather late. It is a bit like the precession of the equinoxes - the newsletter slips relative to the solar year. Past editions of the newsletter are at the following address: http://www.darkage.fsnet.co.uk/Newsletter.htm I welcome all comments, suggestions and contributions, especially the latter. Please forward this newsletter to anyone you think might be interested. Marc Widdowson 2. THE FUTURE OF GLOBAL POLITICS AND THE COMING DARK AGE This is a summary of George Modelski: 'From Leadership to Organisation: The Evolution of Global Politics', in V. Bornschier, C. Chase-Dunn: 'The Future of Global Conflict', London 1999, pp. 11-39, followed by a discussion. Recent work among students of world politics has, according to Modelski, focused on two questions: 1. Why do some states rise to a unique position of global leadership while others fail? 2. And why is it that those powers that have risen so successfully do ultimately also tend to decline? Modelski suggests that these two questions can be answered with the theory of long cycles of global politics. Today, the global system is totally different than 1000 years ago, he claims. It is "obviously more complex" but it is also different insofar as there is cumulative learning and greater dangers. Hence, an explanation of structural change in world politics "should not only show how and why individual states rise and decline but also what the larger picture adds up to", i. e. the evolution of the global polity. 2.1 EXPLAINING RISE AND DECLINE 2.1.1 Process of Selection The basic premise is that over the past 500 years a role of leadership exercised by a succession of nation-states has existed. (1; see notes at end) In Modelski's sense, "a long cycle of global politics marks the rise (or decline) of one world power". Those world powers were, starting from 1430, Portugal, the Dutch Republic, Britain and the USA, as against the challengers, Spain, France and Germany. A cycle comprises four phases of "learning": Agendasetting, coalition-building, macrodecision and execution. (2) The qualifications needed for a nation to pass successfully the four-phased process of selection are: politico-strategic organisation for global reach, lead economy, democratic society and responsiveness to global problems. Hence,

challengers do not rise to global leadership because they a) fail in the selection process and because they b) lack the necessary qualifications. **agenda-setting: This is an "elusive but most unsettling" of the four phases of global political change; with the advent of a new agenda new security problems arise. **coalition-building: New problems stimulate the formation of new alliances around a new set of issues. Usually, such coalition building is about an alignment in favour of or against maintaining global order. Multipolarity rises and the weight of challengers increases. (3) **macro-decision: In this phase, the composition of the next "term of office" is determined. In the four cycles mentioned before, macrodecision meant "a generation-long period of global warfare" (4) Modelski compares the macrodecisions which are in fact global wars, with electoral contests following the electoral campaign: they both deliver a collective choice which is binding for a time. **execution: Execution is the post-war period in which the influence of global leadership is at its unquestioned peak. According to the author, systematic empirical data appears to demonstrate "that in every execution phase so far, the world power enjoyed a healthy monopoly of sea power." The main benefits of this phase are the establishment of an improved institutional system for the global system and the maintenance of a secure global communications infrastructure. 2.1.2 Necessary conditions (=qualifications) The four conditions necessary for a power to pass successfully the fourphased process of selection are: **Politico-strategic organisation for global reach: In all the five global wars, those powers with strong navies rather than large armies emerged victorious. Over the entire period of 1494-1993, a mere nine states could boast significant oceanic sea power. In the 1990s only the USA and perhaps Russia have oceanic navies, while Modelski concedes that maybe "another two or three" could appear as future aspirants over the next few decades: China, Japan or a future Europe including Britain, France and Germany. In brief: the decisive factor is the availability of global mobile forces and the ability to deny the use of oceanic space to hostile powers. (5) **Lead economy: The size of the national product alone is not sufficient for the claim of leadership, equally important is a certain rate of growth which creates and supports leading industrial sectors. Those industries produce the so-called Kondratieff waves that have an innovative impact on the world economy. "The nature and location of future lead industries, if they can be reliably determined are leading indicators of world power and global leadership to be." (6)

**Democratic society: While Modelski concedes that even Britain did not have a "fully" developed democratic "until well past its most creative periods of global involvement", he thinks that all nations who made it to world leadership belonged to the democratic lineage. A free and open society regularises and stabilises decision-making and by protecting human rights provides the foundation for creativity and innovation, he argues. **Responsiveness to global problems: According to Modelski, "Global leadership is not a matter of exercising world dominion [but] it is an arrangement for marrying the interest of one nation-state with the problems of the global system." (7) Analytically, it can be described as openness to world opinion. Global leadership must be capable of producing public goods for the global system. (8) 2.1.3 Non-selection of challengers The main characteristics of historical challengers have been their large economy, relying on natural resources which comprised a significant proportion of regional or even global output, and their substantial populations. However, they have not excelled as lead economies, but rather were surpassed in new sectors by competitors of democratic lineage. The large economy relies less on foreign trade and can offer less to coalition partners. It does not promote the gathering of information and understanding of global conditions, which is necessary for the building of successful coalitions. (9) Finally, in military terms a reliance on a large army can be noted. The challengers were expelled from the oceans. 2.2 THE EVOLUTION OF GLOBAL POLITICS 2.2.1 Periods of global political evolution Long cycles of global politics are instances of an evolutionary process. They subject the world system and world politics to great change. The several long cycles the world has experienced are grouped by Modelski into three eras: evolutionary phase defining problem 930-1420 preconditions failure of world empire 1200-1400 1420-1850 global nucleus balance of power in Europe after 1713 1850-2300 global organisation shape of world organisation c. 2100 2300- consolidation stability of world organisation The author deems the first era "Eurasian", which at its height saw the Mongols try to establish a world empire. It stretched over a vast landmass containing over 40 per cent of the world's population (from Eastern Europe and Syria to the Sea of Japan and the South China Sea) which was never achieved since and had not been attained before. The West European Era was marked by various attempts at universal dominion and the formation of "balance-of-power" coalitions by others in order to check these threats. Modelski sees these tensions continue in the West European era.

Each period corresponds to one stage of global evolution and can be broken down into four long cycles of 120 years in length. 2.2.2 From leadership to organisation (This reproduces Modelski's table - apologies, it is not easy to represent a table in this plain text format.) Necessary conditions | World empire | Global leadership | World organisation principal unit of organisation | tribal | nation-state | federalist politico-strategic forces | cavalry, for continental reach navy, for global reach, in global war | limited rapid reaction forces, earth monitoring economic, social | tribute, stratified | lead economy, open society | world markets, democratic community global | ruling clan | elite | interactive media 2.3 CRITIQUE - THE FUTURE OF GLOBAL POLITICS AND THE COMING DARK AGE Modelski's framework offers a useful tool for describing long term change in world politics and in particular for explaining the crucial turning points in history, when one power manages to overcome its rivals and take up the leadership of the world. On the other hand, the theory's capacity to explain the inevitable long term decline of any leading power is not so obvious. A further shortcoming is the assumption of fixed cycles conforming to rigid "timetables", and there is also a certain lack of precision with regards to terminology (e.g. 'organisation', 'politics'). That said, Modelski's notion of an evolutionary process of global politics may be very fruitful. Sometime in the distant future one might see striking parallels between the emergence of the nation state and the evolution of the world system. Thus, today's most advanced nations are a far cry from the crude hierarchical systems they once used to be. Similarly, the world system will at some stage be characterised by complex functional control rather than by the crude imposition of a set of guidelines, rules and institutions due to some hegemon's military dominance. However, if we adhere to this line of reasoning, it becomes evident that the precondition for such a process of differentiation is true integration, in the sense that one nation first manages to impose its authority on the rest of the world. While scale (10) has obviously been large enough to give rulers a sufficient degree of power to command entire nations comprising tens of millions of people, this process of integration has not yet seen an extension to the global level: No uncontested ruler has arisen from the global

community of states. Moreover, the state, the basic unit of the modern international system, is increasingly threatened and under pressure. Many are in fact failed states. While the international system does not necessarily need states as such, it does seem to require as input territorial units of a certain size and internal stability. In this mode, the system has proven to be successful at providing extended periods of security and prosperity for large regions. Thus, if the modern state disintegrates this does not imply the disappearance of the international system as an analytical category, but a less orderly and predictable situation is likely to emerge overall. It follows that Modelski's complex "federalist" vision of a world (see last chart above: "from leadership to organisation") appears to be feasible only after the coming dark age, when some power has managed to establish global rule.(11) The present world system may be compared with the status of the German empire on the eve of the Thirty Years War: While many people might have wished to see a unified German people, no secular or spiritual authority was capable of delivering this. Even worse, during the war itself, the German territories fell victim to foreign invasions and finally lost over a third of their population. Similarly, today, the elites in America, Europe and Asia, specifically China, might harbour the vision of a unified world with one government and devoid of petty conflict. Yet the reality is that no one nation can now achieve complete dominance over the globe. Rather, the three centres of economic and cultural gravitation are, as with the German empire in the 17th century, likely to face complete destruction during the large transformations that are to come. Whereas the relative decline of the US has by now been recognised by most observers, some may have secretly built their hopes on China as its successor and potential promoter of order, peace and prosperity in the world. It is here that Modelski's theory enters the stage again. China in many respects bears the hallmarks of a "challenger". Its technical infrastructure is hopelessly obsolete - despite (foreign-owned) pockets of excellence - with the armed forces relying on imports to acquire state of the art weaponry. A policy of economic reform has been in place since the days of Deng Xiao Ping, but innovation remains sluggish and China's rapid growth is largely the result of a classical catch-up process. There are at present no signs of China taking the lead in any industrial sector. In spite of a process of restructuring in favour of the navy, air and space forces over the last two decades, China's fighting forces still display a heavy emphasis on the army. While it is conceivable that China might launch surprise attacks against US forces or even the US mainland, China's overall capacity of global power projection will not match that of the US in the foreseeable future. Indeed, any nation seriously prepared to confront the US would receive a response from which it would take decades or longer to recover (12). Meanwhile, the rule of China's political elite places little reliance upon societal

cohesion and legitimacy and instead has a disproportionate emphasis on integration, i.e. forceful repression of dissent. Most people outside China have even less praise for the brutal and corrupt machinations of the Chinese state. We might therefore critically ask whether modern China fulfils Modelski's qualification of an "open society" as well as whether it would have a "responsiveness to global problems" and the ability to promote global cohesion. It seems unlikely. From Modelski's perspective, China is apparently destined to fail the test of global hegemony - i.e. it will not be 'elected' by the world community. Modelski's vision makes it far more likely, in fact, that the US will emerge from the forthcoming macrodecisional war invigorated and with a renewed mandate, perhaps with computer software as the new lead industry. If we move away from Modelski's theory into reality, we can see that China's rapidly ageing society, rising divorce rates, and rampant crime and drug abuse in its vast cities belong to the same set of problems which has earlier beset the highly industrialised societies of Western Europe and America. These problems are compounded by the typical complications of developing nations such as rural strife, growing mobility and unemployment. Who knows - China might have the energy to overcome all this and emerge as the force carrying humanity's baton into the future. The greater likelihood, however, is that middle kingdom will gradually descend into the internal chaos that appears to be so characteristic of the beginning of the 21st century. NOTES (1) Scholars of diverse orientation: Robert Gilpin (1981), Immanuel Wallerstein (1984), Paul Kennedy (1987), Joshua Goldstein (1988), William Thompson (1988) (2) Britain has experienced two learning cycles and it is not possible to decide whether one term, or two terms constitute normal tenure of the office in global leadership. What all European world powers however do have in common is a oceanic base. According to Modelski, the US second cycle - the first one started 1850 and ended 1945 - which began 1973 has not come to a close yet and it is not known which power will play the crucial challenging (3) Modelski provides as a classic example of the construction of such new alliance systems the global realignment after 1873. It was marked by the formation of the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy which lead to the build-up of the Triple Entene of France, Britain and Russia between 1890 and 1907. The emerging Anglo-American special-relationship focused on the rising power of Germany. Modelski recons that by 2000 the global democratic community might be expected to become the focus of coalition-building, see p. 18 (4) Modelski sees "no reason why in the future this process could not assume a different form as new procedures will be devised for coming to a decision . There are reasons to believe that such substitutes can in fact emerge within the democratic community.", see p. 18. (5) An revisited version of the theory would imho probably have to allow for the growing importance of warfare in air and space, something Modelski in fact admits, see p. 22. (6) In the 18th centuries cotton and steam were such leading industries which then provided Britain with a commercial advantage in the 19th century, see p. 22. (7) See p. 24. (8) The author adduces as

instances the British parliament and the American congress. (9) Examples provided by Modelski are Spain of Philip II., the France of Louis XVI, Germany after 1873 and the Soviet Union. (10) Scale is a technical term of dark age terminology. The definition of scale is: "This is the number of distinct actors with whom a given actor comes in contact in a given time interval. It depends on population size, population density and transport and communications technology." (http://www.darkage.fsnet.co.uk/HistorySociety.htm) (11) Nevertheless, humans will eventually get off planet - almost certainly in the next major up-wave. Hence global integration does not necessarily imply integration of the human race, and there may still be multiple political entities in an international system. (12) This statement omits the possibility of a nuclear surprise attack, eliminating all nuclear capable military facilities and assets of the US in the first strike. However, it is believed that this is a games theorist's fantasy, and not achievable in the real world. THE COMING DARK AGE Newsletter May, 2005 1. INTRODUCTION This month's newsletter contains a survey of the state of the German nation written by Dominic Bruce, who also produced the summary of George Modelski's theories in last month's newsletter. Apologies to Dominic for not crediting him before. This month's newsletter also contains a brief analysis of the dark age significance of the recent UK General Election. Past editions of the newsletter are at the following address: http://www.darkage.fsnet.co.uk/Newsletter.htm I welcome all comments, suggestions and contributions, especially the latter. Please forward this newsletter to anyone you think might be interested. Marc Widdowson 2. THE ROTTEN HEART OF EUROPE: GERMANY AND THE COMING DARK AGE 2.1 A EUROPEAN SUCCESS STORY In contrast to France and the United Kingdom, Germany is a young nation state. Born in 1872, after a staggering victory against the Third French Republic, it quickly rose to a position of dominance in Central Europe. In 1912, Germany had the largest and best-trained army as it prepared to expand its ocean-going navy, thereby increasingly challenging the British Empire. The output of its steel and coal industries exceeded the latter's in both quality and quantity, and in chemical and electrical engineering German know-how was unmatched. The state's bureaucracy was lean and efficient, the education system among the most prestigious in Europe, radiating its influence into the Nordic countries, where German was the first foreign language. Unemployment meandered between two and three per cent, the ratio of government expenditures to gross national product stood at around 14 per cent. 60 years after the end of World War II, Germany still has many reasons to rejoice at its situation. Europe's most populous country enjoys

respect within the international community, and for 15 years it has been reunified. German troops are helping guard the fragile peace in Afghanistan and Kosovo, which has bolstered the nation's long term aspirations for a seat in the Security Council. Together with its former arch-enemy France, Germany has been playing a leading role in advancing European integration. Today, it maintains good relations with its Eastern neighbours and Turkey, the latter of which intends to join the EU. The German export industry is powerful, German motor cars, tanks and machine-tools belong to the finest in the world. And in 2006, Germany is even going to host the world cup. At a closer look, however, this bright picture appears elusive. A historical perspective shows that there are profound difficulties. This essay intends to demonstrate that the problems which manifested themselves as small nuisances several decades ago have developed into severe burdens locked in mutually reinforcing vicious circles that are unlikely to disappear. 2.2 ECONOMIC DOWNTURN Especially in the domestic economy, the divergence between then and now is striking. To be sure, in the aftermath of defeat in two world wars, Germany swiftly recaptured an enviable economic position and comprehensive systems of social security were established. Indeed, many of its products are still world class. Yet, today's mass unemployment is not merely the result of taking over the bankrupt German Democratic Republic (GDR). While the number of unemployed was at roughly 250,000 in 1970 [1], it had already increased tenfold by the mid eighties. Today, there are officially 5 million unemployed. The state's share in the economy amounted to 47.5 per cent in 2004 [2], reflecting the vast increase in economically unproductive bureaucratic activity over the decades. With its steadily growing debt burden, Germany has repeatedly failed to observe the criteria of the Maastricht stability pact. The precarious budgetary situation has recently sparked off a debate as to whether raisi! ng the value added tax would be necessary to enable the state to service its debts. Perhaps more than shadowy figures, the fact that Germans, after welcoming Southern Europeans in the 60s and 70s, are now themselves in search of cheap labour in bars, restaurants and the construction industry in Austria and Switzerland, is telling for the worrisome state of the economy [3]. Meanwhile, there is little question that both in absolute and relative terms the performance and ranking of the German education system has dropped considerably [4]. 2.3 SOCIAL DISCOHESION Germany's schools, especially on the elementary and secondary level, are, as their counterparts across Central Europe, feeling the strain from immigration which has not been accompanied by a sustained process of assimilation. As a matter of fact, the majority of citizens whose origins lie in the Balkans, Turkey, Asia and Africa, are segregated in their own ghetto-like subcultures, the largest of which can be found in Berlin (Kreuzberg) and Cologne. This alienation has been amplified by globalisation (travel, satellite television, Internet) and perhaps overcast by a particularly problematic, self-critical sense of national and cultural identity within the host country [5]. While

during the 1980s and 90s the media's focus was on several savage attacks against asylum hostels, since September 11th the public has grown more attentive to infiltration by foreign elements and ideologies radically opposed to what western societies claim to hold dear [6]. Fears about a resurgence of populist sentiment have deepened, a first attempt to impose a ban on the neo-nazi NPD failed in 2003. Especially the economically weak eastern part, presently the stronghold of the communist PDS, where 120 men face 100 women, may give cause for concern [7]. The ailing East has seen exodus of skilled manpower and women since unification, Germany as a whole has witnessed a rise in the number of, mostly wealthy and well-educated, emigrants. Divorce legislation may have played a role in bringing down the reproduction rate from around 2.5 children per woman in 1965 to roughly 1.5 in 2004, which has in turn promoted the ageing of society. The status preserving nature of Germany's conservative welfare state is likely to put a heavy strain on the economically active population. Another area where social discohesion has become apparent is the military. Designed as a conscript army, it is relying increasingly on volunteers while a substantial proportion of ! young men fit for military service opt for the longer but more pleasant and popular alternative service [8]. While the hardware of the Bundeswehr and the training of its officers and specific units are still considered formidable, the organisation's overall readiness and morale are being questioned. 2.4 INNOVATION FAILURE It seems ridiculous to speak of innovation failure in Germany. As mentioned before, the country hosts some of the world's most successful companies, and the infrastructure it provides to its 80+ million citizens is impressive. The point is not that Germany has an obsolete and inefficient technological base but rather that innovation has been slowing down considerably. This holds true for every western country when we compare the rate of change between, say, 1915 and 1960, and 1960 and today. Yes, everyday life has become even more comfortable and, through the diffusion of a few groundbreaking inventions like the computer, the internet and the mobile phone, even more fugacious. But the transformation lacks the powerful and dramatic quality which characterised the first half of the 20th century. A nice case in point for Germany is the Transrapid. As early as 1934, Hermann Kempner received a patent for his concept of a train propelled by magnetic levitation. In 1969, practical research started on the project and by the end of the 1980s, test vehicles reached speeds up to 440 km/h. But from here, the project failed to make headway in Germany. The Transrapid bogged down in a quagmire of evaluations, alternating responsibilities between planning committees, the state and federal governments and fears concerning noise and technical feasibility. In 2003, North Rhine-Westphalia resigned from building the Metrorapid from Dortmund to Dsseldorf. Meanwhile, China had decided to acquire the technology for a 30 km long line between Shanghai and Pudong International Airport [9]. Another prominent example indicative of innovation failure is the protracted discussion about the future of Germany's nuclear industry. Twelve years after the end of the Second World War, the first experimental reactor was set up at Munich, marking the

beginning of a phase of expansion during which 20 power stations were constructed. In 1988, the dismantling of the first nuclear reactor took place. Although it is unclear how Germany will make up for the energy shortfall, the ruling coalition (SPD and Greens) under chancellor Gerhard Schrder has decided to phase out nuclear power until 2025. Under current legislation, each of Germany's 19 reactors will be closed down on its 32nd birthday [10]. To add insult to injury, Germany has become the world's greatest producer of wind power with roughly 14,000 generators producing around 1% of Germany's total energy demand. Despite the plain fact, that wind power is much less efficient than conventional forms of energy generation let a! lone nuclear power and has, ironically, come under attack from environmentalists, current plans envisage that wind will meet 12.5% of Germany's energy needs by 2010 [11]. 2.5 OUTLOOK Let us be clear: Germany belongs to an exclusive club of nations where the majority of the population enjoys a stupendous level of wealth, physical and social security as well as legal certainty. It will remain a major player in both World and European affairs for the foreseeable future. The question is, however, whether it will continue to do so as a source of stability and prosperity or whether it will turn into a footloose payload, similar to Russia, sloshing about dangerously in the back of the carriage. This asks for an examination of the severity of the current crisis. Many people have blamed Germany's problems on the reunification with the bankrupt assets which constitute the former German Democratic Republic. Undoubtedly, the fall of the Berlin wall has contributed substantially to the extent of today's difficulties. But it has not caused them in the first place. The underlying causes are to be sought in the laws of history, which dictate that in a given society high levels of integration, organisation and cohesion will ultimately promote disintegration, disorganisation and discohesion. An indication that such a process is in operation may be seen in the fact that in principle all western nations have been facing similar problems. One might argue that the problems are a short-term fluctuation and that 20 to 30 years are a very brief period in human history. The latter is of course true in absolute terms. Yet, if we take into account the clock-rate at which our high-scale! [12] societies function, the duration and persistence of the syndrome should be a cause for alarm. And the longer it is able to worsen without causing major disruptions, the more catastrophic the collapse will be once it will have arrived. From what has been said it follows that party politics have very limited significance for the coming dark age. Nevertheless, the decisions of Germany's current government with regards to energy policy are grave. We are not talking about someone leaving the light on before going out for a drink on a summer's evening. Rather, the situation might be compared with a landlord about to disassemble the central heating at the onset of winter. Even if the plans are annulled, the experiment will cost society dearly. Germany's chances for a change for the better are slim. One might think that Eastern European countries like Poland, where unemployment is at terrifically high levels (20%), are undergoing a catch-up process, at the end of which the EU would emerge wealthier as a whole. The same hopes were harboured for Italy, Greece and

Spain 30 years ago. All things considered, organised crime and the informal economy will profit most from the continuing expansion of Europe, an area in which Germany already has its share of problems [13]. The demographer Herwig Birg has predicted that the proportion of foreigners under 40 years of age will hit 50% in Germany's major cities by 2010 [14]. Even if such a scenario fails to materialise, the trend is highly unlikely to come to a halt, let alone reverse. Under such circumstances, the number of Germans willing to move overseas might rise. What many fear, the revival of a powerful national socialist or racist government, appears rather unlikely to us. To be sure, nationalist and conservative movements are forces to be reckoned with. It is also by no means beyond the realms of possibility that an authoritarian or technocratic form of government might at some stage replace today's democratic arrangement. But German society is too fragmented and split for any ideologically pronounced political force to achieve a durable hegemony and enjoy legitimacy and enthusiastic mass support. If we revisit 1929, a tentative conclusion may be that both Germany's exposure to external shocks and the damage such reverberations are able to inflict have significantly increased. NOTES (1) http://www.lpb.bwue.de/aktuell/puu/4_01/a23_a32.htm (2) http://ftd.de/pw/de/1108979726147.html (3) http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,1472748,00.html (4) http://www.oecdobserver.org/news/fullstory.php/aid/702/PISA:_The_consequen ces_for_Germany.html (5) The point may be illustrated by this recent episode: Vandal scrawls swastika on Berlin Holocaust memorial on its first day open http://www.canada.com/news/world/story.html?id=15e8e982-d77d-4dc8a335-4ef78f909ad7 (6) Several of the September 11th suicide pilots had lived in Germany, attending German universities. The author and renowned journalist (FAZ) Udo Ulfkotte has warned about the existence of sophisticated Islamist networks in his book "Der Krieg in unseren Stdten" (the war in our cities). (7) http://www.innovationsreport.de/html/berichte/gesellschaftswissenschaften/bericht-6423.html (8) One of the main reasons why the military has not been transformed into a professional army is the fact that health care and social relief would greatly suffer from a discontinuation of the alternative service. http://www.deutscherundschau.com/archiv/03_01_99/bundeswehr.htm (9) Scheduled operations began on 29th December 2004. http://www.transrapid.de/en/index.html. Before, with 501 km/h a new world record was achieved. (10) http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4536203.stm (11) The main reason why wind power has managed to assert itself in Germany is a special law which forces utility companies to buy electricity provided by renewable energy sources even though it is much more expensive. An issue which is often overlooked is the fact that a sizeable number of conventional power stations needs to remain in operation to compensate for changeable wind conditions. http://www.udo-meyer.de/html/body_keine_windkraftanlagen_in_der_.html (12) Scale is a technical term of dark age terminology. The definition of scale is: "This is the number of distinct actors with whom a given actor comes in contact in a given time interval. It depends on population size, population

density and transport and communications technology." It is essentially equivalent to what Emil Durkheim called 'dynamic density'. (13) Udo Ulfkotte, Grenzenlos kriminell, Mnchen 2004. (14) Herwig Birg, Die demographische Zeitenwende, Mnchen 2000. 3. UK ELECTION 2005 Dark age theory would predict, due to discohesion, an increasing fragmentation of the political scene as we move towards a dark age. In the UK General Election, the number of parties represented in the House of Commons increased from 10 in 2001 to 12 in 2005. This certainly suggests fragmentation. To get a more precise picture it is appropriate to use an information theorytype measure, i.e. the 'entropy' of the House of Commons. This is found by taking the sum over i of -Pi*log(Pi) where Pi is the proportion of seats obtained by the ith party. Such a measure of entropy increases with the number of parties and with the even-ness of the split of seats between them. To give an idea, if there were only one party with all the seats, the entropy would be 0. If there were two parties each with half the seats, the entropy would be 1. If there were two parties, but one had 99% of the seats and the other had 1% of the seats, the entropy would be 0.08. The last example shows how the entropy measure reflects the spread of the share of seats. Clearly a parliament in which two parties share the seats 50-50 is more fragmented than one in which one party has almost all of them, and this is reflected in the entropy (1 versus 0.08). Given this, we find that the entropy of the House of Commons in 2001 was 1.52, whereas in 2005 it is 1.65. Thus there has been a significant increase in the fragmentation of the political scene by this more sophisticated measure. There were also various parties that received votes in the election but did not gain seats in parliament because of the British 'first-past-the-post' electoral system. If we look at share of the vote, rather than share of the seats, we find an even higher entropy of about 2.25 in 2005, compared with 1.9 in 2001 (these figures are approximate as they do not take into account all independents or minor parties, such as the Monster Raving Loony Party). Behind the statistics is a continued trend towards independent members of parliament, which were almost unheard of a decade or so ago. The doctor who won a seat in 2001 as part of a protest against plans to close the local hospital was re-elected. In Wales, an ex-Labour Party politician who was standing in protest against the Labour policy of all-women shortlists (i.e. men could not be considered in the process of selecting an electoral candidate) succeeded in taking a seat from Labour as an independent. Ex-Labour MP George Galloway also won a seat, representing his own Respect Party. The nationalist parties show a more mixed picture. One would expect these to increase in popularity as a mark of discohesion, especially since they campaign for independence of their respective regions of the UK. The Scottish Nationalists gained two seats, having lost a seat in 2001. The Welsh

Nationalists lost one seat (in 2001, they remained level). In Northern Ireland, Sinn Fein gained one seat, despite or perhaps because of recent controversies linking them to political espionage and organised crime. Nevertheless, all these nationalist parties lost a little bit of vote share, even when they gained seats. On the other hand, the UK Independence Party increased its share of the vote from 1.5% to 2.3%. The vote for the anti-immigration British National Party, whose leader was recently arrested on racism charges, also went from 0.2% to 0.7%. Finally, the Green Party vote increased from 0.6% to 1%, thus providing reassurance to all dark age enthusiasts that its pro-innovation failure agenda will continue to influence mainstream thinking. Overall, the election shows no dramatic changes, but still confirms the generally discohesive climate of our times. THE COMING DARK AGE Newsletter June, 2005 1. INTRODUCTION This month's newsletter contains some introductory remarks on the subject of 'History'. Past editions of the newsletter are at the following address: http://www.darkage.fsnet.co.uk/Newsletter.htm I welcome all comments, suggestions and contributions, especially the latter. Please forward this newsletter to anyone you think might be interested. Marc Widdowson 2. HISTORY 2.1 Justifying history A few months ago I attended a lecture on some rather esoteric aspect of early medieval history. Afterwards, my girlfriend, who had come along for the ride, said that during the lecture it occurred to her that if someone had taken this roomful of historians and dropped them in a large hole in the ground, no one would have noticed very much. She tends to share the view, attributed to Henry Ford, that history is bunk. In some ways, she seems to have a point. Does it really matter what Bishop Remy said to King Clovis, or when the latter was baptised? Is it important to anything what Charlemagne was getting at in his will? Why do we devote our careers to exploring these seeming irrelevancies? However, I pointed out to her that if you did take all the world's historians and dropped them in a hole, along with all the history books and such bunk, it would not be long before some bright spark asked "Where did we come from? How did things get to be way they are? What was life like before we were born?" It is simple human curiosity to be interested in the past, and hooray for that. Yes, we could ignore history and many other things,

but wouldn't that be an argument for reducing us to the level of sheep chomping grass in the field? I was reminded of these thoughts this evening as I was reading the book "Britain BC" by the archaeologist Francis Pryor. In his introduction, Pryor tries to justify the importance of history and archaeology by saying that without them "we will never place our personal and national lives in a true context" and "then we are prey to nationalists, fundamentalists and bigots of all sorts" blah-de-blah-de-blah. All worthy sentiments, but why do we need to place our lives in a true context? Many people get by quite happily with no more historical perspective than what happened in last Tuesday's episode of 'Eastenders'. And will academic work in archaeology really put an end to fundamentalism and bigotry? I think not. To me, the study of history does not need to be justified by its practical benefits, politically correct or otherwise. It is simply that we have a desire to know, to understand, to master our location in time and space, and this is what differentiates us from sheep-that is all the justification it needs. 2.2 The nature of history History is the study, not of human beings, as one might think, but of human relationships. That is to say, if there were human beings, but no possibility of forming relationships between them, then there would be no history. We would all simply have to fend for ourselves in our own little worlds. There could be no art, no literature, no battles, no great buildings, no economic activity, nothing at all that requires the interaction of two or more people. Humans could only know what they learned for themselves, and when they died they would leave little behind but their bones. The reality is, of course, that humans can form relationships, and the patterns of history reflect the properties of these relationships. In fact, there are just three distinct types of relationship, as I describe elsewhere, and it is from these three relationships that all the rich complexity of history and society is derived-just as all the atoms and molecules of physics, chemistry and biology are built out of the three fundamental particles of proton, neutron and electron. 2.3 Communication We can form relationships because we can communicate. Animals have rudimentary abilities to communicate, but in humans this skill is developed to an extraordinary degree. We normally think of communication as being about language. But it goes further than that. The basis of our ability to communicate is the use and understanding of symbols, to represent ideas or mental states. Not just language, but all human culture is based on the manipulation of symbols. What you wear to work, for example, is a symbol. Whether you wear a smart suit or jeans and a tee-shirt, you are sending out message about the attitudes you bring to the situation. If you send out the wrong messages, you may find yourself running into difficulties.

Humans also have a well developed sense of narrative. We match events to patterns, and think about motives, and causes and consequences. In this way we are able to interpret and act appropriately in social situations, guessing what might happen next, and turning things in the direction we want. Things like drama, music and art may then be seen as by-products of these basic human faculties. Our grasp of narrative and our love of symbols are put to effect in ways that are not immediately practical but that satisfy deep impulses. Music, in fact, is closely related to language, being a kind of exaggerated application of the sense of rhythm and prosody that underlies our capacity for speech. THE COMING DARK AGE Newsletter August, 2005 1. INTRODUCTION This month's newsletter contains a test/examination/quiz on the subject of dark age theory. The best solution reaching the Dark Age Team by 10 October 2005 will receive as a prize a copy of Seneca the Younger's "Letters from a Stoic" (Penguin edition). Few entries are expected, if any, so please do not hesitate to send in your submission even if it is incomplete. Note that not all questions have "correct" answers. Some are at the cutting edge of dark age theory. Please submit your answers to test@darkage.fsnet.co.uk. Past editions of the newsletter are at the following address: http://www.darkage.fsnet.co.uk/Newsletter.htm I welcome all comments, suggestions and contributions, especially the latter. Please forward this newsletter to anyone you think might be interested. Marc Widdowson 2. DARK AGE THEORY TEST Q.1 Define or explain the following terms, as they are used in dark age theory (DAT): a) Scale b) Institution c) Principle of mutual causality d) Organisation e) Ensemble (or eigenmode - the terms are somewhat interchangeable) f) Stranger (please also expand any DAT technical terms used in your answer) Q.2 Using units of "persons per year", estimate the scale of the following social contexts: a) A band of hunter-gatherers in the Kalahari desert b) A village in medieval Europe c) New York Q.3 What are the component institutions of the stranger ensemble/eigenmode? Q.4 Explain why the Nile Valley was one of the first regions where civilisation arose. You may like to use some of the following terms in your answer: circumscription, vagility, stranger, integration.

Q.5 Provide three illustrations of the phoenix principle (marks will be given for originality). Q.6 Suggest measuring units for each of the three social dimensions of DAT: a) Integration b) Organisation c) Cohesion Q.7 When would you place the peak of the following civilisations? Explain your reasoning. Credit will be given for considering a variety of issues, e.g. cultural, technological, imperial. You may find that there was more than one peak. a) Classical Roman b) Chinese c) Western (This means the civilisation that rose in Europe after the fall of Rome. The peak may be in the future or the past depending on your point of view.) Q.8 Why are issues to do with education normally considered under the "organisation" dimension of DAT? Credit will be given for answers that also consider the relevance of the other two dimensions. Q.9 The 2004 Turner prize for art was won by Jeremy Deller with a film about George Bush's hometown in Texas. Is this a sign of the coming dark age? If so, why? If not, why not? Q.10 Will the following hasten or delay the coming dark age? Explain. a) The internet b) The Bush presidency c) The Chinese space programme d) Third world debt relief e) CCTV f) The European Union Q.11 Why does the situation in Zimbabwe reflect the weakness of American hegemony? Try to give as technical an answer as possible, using the theoretical properties of integration. (E.g., how does one detect the extent of a politically integrated unit?) Q.12 The Egyptian First Intermediate Period lasted about twenty five years. Greece's post-Mycenaean dark age lasted some four centuries. What factors might influence the duration of a dark age? Please submit your answers to test@darkage.fsnet.co.uk by 10 October 2005. THE COMING DARK AGE Newsletter September, 2005 1. INTRODUCTION This month's newsletter comprises some comments on the favoured barbarian route across the Gibraltar Strait. No submissions have yet been received for the test of dark age theory included in the last newsletter. Closing date is 10 October 2005. Please send in even partial attempts. You may be the only entrant, which guarantees you the prize. Send answers by email to the address on the website.

Past editions of the newsletter are on the website, although this has not been updated for a year. I welcome all comments, suggestions and contributions, especially the latter. Please forward this newsletter to anyone you think might be interested. Marc Widdowson 2. SPAIN, NORTH AFRICA AND THE BARBARIANS The North African towns of Ceuta and Melilla have recently been in the news as African migrants have been storming them, some dying in the attempt. These are Spanish possessions although they are on the Moroccan coast. They have long been a jumping-off point for barbarians heading in one direction or the other. For many centuries, both North Africa and Spain were part of the Roman Empire. However, in autumn 409, Spain was invaded by the Vandals, Alans and Sueves, three barbarian groups that had crossed the Rhine from Germany a couple of years earlier. Over the next couple of decades, they resisted Roman attempts to take back Spain. In the late 420s, there was civil war between the top Roman commanders of Italy and Africa. The Vandal king Gaiseric took this opportunity to move his forces across the Gibraltar Strait, a distance of a dozen miles or so, and established a bridgehead in what is now Morocco. From there, the Vandals spread along the coast, and captured Carthage in 439, thus completing their conquest of North Africa. They left Spain to the Sueves, and it largely came back under Roman control. In his "History of the Vandal Persecution", written around 488, Victor of Vita tells us of the atrocities perpetrated by the Vandals in Africa: "Finding a province which was at peace and enjoying quiet, the whole land beautiful and flowering on all sides, they set to work on it with their wicked forces, laying it waste by devastation and bringing everything to ruin with fire and murders. They did not even spare the fruit-bearing orchards, in case people who had hidden in the caves of the mountains or steep places or any remote areas would be able to eat the foods produced by them after they had passed...They burned houses of prayer...When they found the doors of a sacred building closed they opened up a way with the blows of their hatchets...Many distinguished bishops and noble priests were put to death with different kinds of torment...so that the things which were in their keeping would be brought forth more easily under pressure of pain...Some had their mouths forced open with poles and stakes, and disgusting filth was put in their jaws...They tortured others by twisting cords around their foreheads and shins until they snapped...In their barbaric frenzy they even snatched children from their mothers' breasts...They held babies by the feet, upside down, and cut them in two from their bottoms to the tops of their heads." And so it goes on. In 460, the emperor Majorian was in Spain to plan an invasion of North Africa and capture it back from the Vandals. The latter were now operating as a naval power, and had crossed the Mediterranean to raid Sicily and sack Rome. They heard what Majorian was up to and launched a surprise attack on

his fleet in the Spanish harbour of Cartagena. This put an end to Majorian's plans. The Vandal kingdom of North Africa was, however, eventually conquered by the Roman general, Belisarius, in 533. By this time, the western Roman empire was already defunct and, since 476, only the eastern empire continued in existence, ruled from what is now Istanbul (formerly Constantinople). Nevertheless, under the emperor Justinian, Belisarius and others managed to reconquer large parts of the west, including Italy, North Africa and, returning across the straits, parts of the southern Spanish coast. Spain at this time was in the hands of the Visigoths. They had begun to take over in the 480s, and they established themselves fully in the peninsula after being driven out of Gaul by the Franks. At some stage, the Visigoths had captured Ceuta from the Vandals, but they lost it again as Belisarius re-took North Africa. In 547, the Visigothic king Theudis sent an invasion force across the Strait to get Ceuta back again. This ended in disaster, and supposedly the entire army was wiped out. Theudis was murdered shortly afterwards. Nevertheless, the Visigoths continued to struggle against the remnants of east Roman (Byzantine) rule in this part of the world. Over the next century, they drove the Byzantines out of Spain and again crossed to Africa where they established coastal enclaves. The next invaders to arrive were the new armies of the Muslims. In only a hundred years, they had come out of the Arabian peninsula and conquered all along the North African coast, as well as in other directions. By 710, they had reached Morocco. According to legend, a certain Count Julian, the Visigothic governor of Ceuta at this time, was disgruntled with the Visigothic king, Roderic, who had raped his daughter, Florinda. In revenge, Julian encouraged the Moors to cross the Gibraltar Strait and conquer Spain, which they did. Julian and his daughter are surely mythical figures, invented later to explain the ease of the Islamic conquest. Only slightly less legendary is the Islamic general (and slave), Tariq ibn Ziyad, who led the initial raiding into Spain in 710. Supposedly, Gibraltar was named after him as "the mountain (Arabic, jabal) of Tariq". Tariq's army disembarked at the Spanish port of Tarifa, from which the Vandals had come to North Africa three centuries earlier, and within a few years Spain was conquered. When Tariq visited the Caliph, to report his success, he was whipped and imprisoned - generals who were too successful were a threat to the ruler's authority. Belisarius had similarly been stripped of his command by Justinian, who was afraid that Belisarius might be ambitious for the imperial throne. For the next half-millennium, Spain was peaceful and civilised under the western Islamic Empire. However, the Christian kingdoms of the north undertook a gradual reconquest, culminating in the capture of Granada in 1492 and elimination of the last vestiges of Islamic rule from Spain. The Christian Spaniards did not stop at the coast, but continued across the strait to North Africa. The Archbishop of Toledo urged King Ferdinand II of Aragon to devote himself to the conquest of Africa and the spreading of the Christian faith. Pope Alexander VI also approved and authorised a special tax to pay for this "crusade". Spain did indeed capture territory along the African coast over the next few decades, including Melilla in 1497. However, it was more

interested in the New World, and with the decline of the Islamic Empire, the North African coast became the haunt of pirates, the so-called Barbary corsairs. Nevertheless, Ceuta, Melilla and a few islands off the Moroccan coast have remained Spanish to this day. Melilla and Ceuta are now magnets for would-be immigrants not only from Morocco and Algeria, but also from Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Mauritius, Cameroon, Mali and even further afield. They are surrounded by high wire fences, which are heavily patrolled, but a constant stream gets through. Some of these people have crossed the Sahara desert. They are not going to be put off by a bit of barbed wire. Furthermore, the Moroccans and Algerians can be easily expelled once they are caught, but the black Africans cannot be. They are not Moroccan citizens and Morocco will not have them back. Instead they get the chance of seeking asylum, perhaps in some other European country. In his 1970s novel, "The Camp of the Saints", the French author Jean Raspail envisaged an invasion of France by an armada of 800,000 illegal immigrants, sailing, in this case, from the Ganges and arriving en masse on the French Riviera. His book was essentially a complaint or warning about the west's failure to stem the tide of migrants. He saw these migrants as keen to grab the material fruits of western civilisation but without any affection for its culture, or indeed intent on destroying it. Raspail's novel is generally considered inflammatory and racist. It was also written at a time when India seemed to be one of the world's more desperate regions and the source of immigration, whereas, thirty years on, the situation has changed and Africa is much more in that role. Nevertheless, the mass movement of barbarians into and out of Europe, often across the Gibraltar Strait, may be considered part of the natural flow of history, and one should not be surprised to see it happen again. THE COMING DARK AGE Newsletter October, 2005 1. INTRODUCTION Islam has a very bad press these days, and the general western public is taught to think of Muslims as inherently radical and violent. Politicians and even religious commentators encourage such a simplistic viewpoint as they talk about Islam, anti-semitism, terrorism and fundamentalism as though they were all the same thing. This month's newsletter questions such preconceptions. Past editions of the newsletter are on the website, although this has not been updated for a year. I welcome all comments, suggestions and contributions, especially the latter. Please forward this newsletter to anyone you think might be interested. Marc Widdowson 2. A RELIGION THAT SANCTIONS VIOLENCE?

Islamic discontent and resistance are political phenomena When two American youths launched a sadistic and suicidal attack on Columbine High School in 1999, one of their aims was to take hostages, demand an airliner and crash it into downtown New York. Acres of media analysis were devoted to the twisted psychology of these misfits and their lunatic behaviour. With the terrorist attacks against the World Trade Centre and Pentagon, no such psychological inquiry seemed necessary. Once it was established that the perpetrators were Muslims, enough had been said. Theirs is perceived as an extreme and militaristic religion, peculiarly given to this kind of atrocity. Westerners already associate Islam with suicide bombing and hostage taking, as well as mistreatment of women and ceremonial burning of the United States flag. It might therefore seem preposterous to argue that Islam is not inherently violent or repressive. Yet the prophet Mohammed denounced unwarranted bloodshed and the subordination of women, while shari'a law-the hand-chopping, adultress-stoning legal code-has no real Koranic justification and is not a necessary part of Islam. According to the Islamic calendar, this is the year 1422, i.e. the early fifteenth century. It is instructive to recall how Christians were behaving at the equivalent era. Tearing out of tongues was a favourite punishment. Women were burned at the stake. The Inquisition was in full swing. While Christians were tolerated in the Ottoman Empire and Arab world, in Europe heretics were being tortured and put to death. Jews who had lived peacefully in Islamic Spain were being rooted out and expelled by the reconquering Christians. When Muslims look at the West, they see a people far more vicious than themselves. The crusades, for example, are remembered in the Middle East for their bestial ghastliness. One group of crusaders killed eight thousand Jews before even leaving Germany. In the Middle East, the crusaders slaughtered whole towns after the defenceless inhabitants surrendered, and they killed Muslims and Orthodox Christians indiscriminately. Their behaviour contrasted with the Islamic armies, who gave safe passage to non-combatants and generally adhered to recognised rules of warfare. This may be thought ancient history, but the same attitudes seemingly re-emerged during the 1991 Gulf conflict, when the West appeared intent on crushing Iraq and ignored at least six offers by Saddam Hussein to withdraw and negotiate. The allies then unleashed a ferocious bombing campaign, which involved heavy civilian casualties and massacred some 200,000 Iraqis for a mere 150 Western deaths. The 2003 invasion was equally one-sided, and Iraqi citizens continue to die in large numbers under the coalition occupation. To Muslims, the twentieth century is replete with examples of the West's abusive treatment. In 1911, Italy initiated the tactic of aerial bombing when its aircraft dropped grenades on a Libyan town. In 1919, Winston Churchill approved chemical weapons for use against Arabs, declaring them an ideal means of dealing with 'uncivilised tribes'. The 1950s saw the illegal Suez operation, during which a British warship bombarded Port Said and killed several Egyptian civilians. The West's Second World War record is one of apparent extreme inhumanity. Muslims have never been responsible for anything like the Holocaust or the allied incendiary raids that killed 600,000 civilians in Germany and, along with two nuclear bombs, similar numbers in Japan.

Islam's current fundamentalism reflects a political agenda. Its leaders are university educated arrivistes with enormous chips on their shoulders. They seem to have everything going for them until they discover that they are second class citizens of this shrinking world. They are revolutionaries rather than reactionaries. Their fundamentalism is a modern response to contemporary discontents. The Iranian revolution of 1979 looked like the classic triumph of medieval-minded mullahs over modernism and reform. Yet the Shah had created the conditions for his own downfall by a combination of murderous repression and thoroughgoing social change that threatened many vested interests. The fact that only American expatriates seemed to be getting rich on the country's oil boom was the final straw. Islam provided the focus for protest because it represented the re-assertion of distinctively Iranian values. Even Saudi Arabia, the homeland of Islam, is now threatened by protest and is a recruiting ground for terrorists. This is despite the fact that Saudi Arabia is the most conservative country in the Middle East, where alcohol is illegal, women are forbidden to drive, miscreants are publicly flogged, and Christian worship is banned. One might wonder what more the fundamentalists could possibly want. In fact, their complaints have little to do with religion and everything to do with dissatisfaction with the parasitic royals, and resentment at missing out on a fair share of Saudi Arabia's vast wealth. None of this is to condone, excuse or explain what happened on 11 September 2001. It is to assert, however, that one should not confuse cultural and political issues with the teachings of Islam or any other religion. After all, Christianity today has its own fundamentalists, who make death threats against computer games manufacturers and murder abortionists. Let it not be said that Christianity has the monopoly on love, moderation and forgiveness, and that Islam is irredeemably uncompromising and antagonistic. Both religions preach respect for others, and yet both have sometimes spread their influence at the point of a sword. The Christian world's present liberalism and the angry fanaticism of some Muslim peoples must be recognised for what they are, i.e. socio-economic and geo-political phenomena. They say nothing at all about the possibilities or persuasions of their respective faiths. THE COMING DARK AGE Newsletter November, 2005 1. INTRODUCTION In this month's newsletter I would like to talk briefly about miscellaneous aspects of human creativity, dark ages and the phoenix principle. Past editions of the newsletter are on the website, although this has not been updated for a year. I welcome all comments, suggestions and contributions, especially the latter. Please forward this newsletter to anyone you think might be interested. Marc Widdowson 2. CREATIVITY AND THE PHOENIX PRINCIPLE

The basic argument of the Coming Dark Age site is that dark ages are an essential part of the workings of human creativity. We use the term phoenix principle to describe the idea that it is necessary to destroy an old and failing way of life in order to create a new and ultimately better one. It might be asked, why can we not just steadily evolve from the old to the new-why is it necessary to destroy and rebuild-and at one level the answer is simply that it is an empirical fact that this is the way history works. Beyond this, the point is that there may be no evolutionary solution as existing institutions force you down a particular avenue, which may no longer be optimal. For instance, if you have a towns in a particular position, you build motorways and water and gas supply networks that converge on that position. If now external conditions change so that it would be better for the town to be located fifty miles to the east, it is not just a question of moving the town but also of shifting the road and utility networks that serve it. However, you cannot simply swing a motorway or a gas pipeline through an angle of a few degrees so that it ends in a different place. What you tend to do therefore is limp along, with the town in its existing, sub-optimal position, because it is just too difficult to move it. This means that your society is less fit than it used to be, and with enough problems of this kind it may eventually enter a dark age. The dark age is then the solution to the very problems that caused it. This is because the motorway falls into disrepair and disuse. Local people scavenge the roadsigns and metal barriers, carting them away. Weeds erupt through the tarmac, breaking it up, and spreading over everything. After hundreds of years the former route of the motorway is just a phantom imprint on the landscape. At last, your society can recover from its dark age, and now there is no reason to follow the old line of the motorway. You have carte blanche to build towns, motorways and utilities where they are needed, not where tradition constrains them to be. There are many examples of this phenomenon in the various historical dark ages, which are mostly documented on the Coming Dark Age website. It is interesting to note, however, that this phenomenon seems to have applied even in the earlier, prehistoric experience of the human race. To quote Francis Pryor in his book 'Britain BC' (p. 122): "One of the reasons why the introduction of farming, and the transition from the mobility of the Mesolithic hunter-gatherer to the more sedentary lifestyle of the Neolithic period, seems so revolutionary is that the two periods are actually separated by about half a millennium of apparent emptiness. There is remarkably little archaeological evidence to account for the second half of the fifth millennium BC (ie from about 4500 to 4000 BC)...Another example, which also happens to coincide with a transitional period, is that between the Late Bronze Age and the Early Iron Age, in the seventh and eighth centuries BC." The 'emptiness' of the archaeological record corresponds to the 'darkness' of more historical dark ages. The significant thing to note here is how the dark epoch spanned a technocultural revolution in each case, from mesolithic to neolithic, or from late bronze to early iron. Another example concerns the Natufian culture that inhabited the middle east around 12,000 to 9000 BC. The Natufians lived by hunting gazelle. Initially, they killed male and female gazelle in equal numbers. However, as population grew, they developed a strategy of killing males preferentially, since killing males had hardly any impact on the gazelles' ability to reproduce themselves. Nevertheless, they tended to kill

the larger males, and this produced an evolutionary selection pressure that caused the size of the gazelles to decrease over time. As a result, later Natufians show signs of nutritional distress that are not present in earlier Natufians. Natufian culture and society regressed and they were forced back to a nomadic way of life and, due to population pressure, a move into marginal environments like the Nagev desert. This produced a thousand year period of retrenchment. When society began to move forward again in this area it was through the development of agriculture and a switch to domesticated sheep and goats instead of gazelle. In other words, it was necessary for the traditional Natufian way of life to fail wholeheartedly before people were forced into a more complex, more intensive and ultimately more promising ecological mode.