The Importance of Asabiya
Successful societies need social cohesion, and we hardly have any
Peter Turchin is best known for championing cliodynamics. For those unfamiliar with this concept, it’s a fancy way to describe the use of math in the study of history. Proponents of cliodynamics hold that history is “shaped by great impersonal forces,” as Turchin puts it, and that these impersonal forces can be demystified with the help of mathematical modeling. While cliodynamics doesn’t gift-wrap crystal balls, it translates the language of history into terms that help the historian better understand historical processes and, consequently, what to expect in the future. Make of it what you will.
Unsure of what to make of it myself, I decided to read Turchin’s War and Peace and War. Published in 2006, the book applies cliodynamics to explain the rise and fall of empires. Having read it, I still can’t say I am sold on the concept. But you don’t need to embrace cliodynamics to find the underlying arguments as persuasive as they are relevant for our own turbulent times of transition.
For reasons I will mention later, Turchin shows that “imperiogenesis” (the birth of empires) tended to occur along the frontiers of what he calls “metaethnic communities” (Turchin’s word for civilizations). As empires expand, they become prosperous and stable; a golden age sets in. But the golden age of any empire carries within it the seeds of its own demise. Eventually, all that wealth causes overpopulation, both among the commoners and the elites; the overpopulation leads to discontent and intra-elite conflict, which inevitably results in “imperiopathosis” (the decline of empires). The empire that soared to magnificent heights fades into the gloaming of history, leaving at most scenic ruins to satisfy archeologists and tourists.
For any reader looking for parallels with the present day, disclaimers abound. To chart the development of empires, Turchin marshals examples of agrarian societies (Ancient Rome, Russia, the Carolingians, etc.), so the applicability of his analysis to the modern world is questionable. Then there’s the slippery question of defining empires. According to Turchin, an empire is a territorially large, multiethnic state with a complex power structure. As Canada and Australia are both large multiethnic states but are clearly no empires, the emphasis should be on the “complex power structure” part. Turchin does not elaborate on this, but thinks the US and China both constitute modern empires, even though, with the exception of several American territories, neither state has any colonies or overseas dependencies to speak of. Russia, on the other hand, is only a “potential” empire, as is the EU. Russia will likely become an actual empire if it succeeds in absorbing Chechnya (again, this is a 2006 book), and Turchin does not at all clarify what the EU must do in order to qualify — indeed, with the specters of Brexit and rolling populism haunting Brussels, one might ask if the EU will ever be able to qualify at all.
Yet the book contains important lessons for us, to be ignored at our peril. To explain what drives empires in their boom and bust cycles, Turchin introduces asabiya, a term coined by the 14th-century historian Ibn Khaldun and one that is — surely an irony for someone looking to quantify history — quite tricky to measure. Asabiya is the level of solidarity in a given society. Crudely put, it is the ability of a society to get shit done. All things being equal, societies with high asabiya are stronger than those with low asabiya; all empires had high asabiya during their integrative phases and low asabiya during the disintegrative ones.
You don’t need to go to the desert to realize that societies require a high degree of social cohesion to do better than others, nor should it be surprising that it was societies with high levels of asabiya that grew into empires. But what makes for high asabiya? Turchin identifies three components.
One is religion. A bugbear of progressive thought, religion is seen by modern liberals as a force of oppression and social retardation. Don’t you believe it. In agrarian societies at least, religion gave people an identity that distinguished them from others, fomented unity, and bestowed upon societies a sense of common purpose. Religion also imposed norms and strictures on societies, and those are necessary if you want to succeed. As Turchin notes, “Generally, in a struggle between two groups of people, the group with stronger norms . . . has a greater chance of winning.”
Egalitarianism is another vital component of asabiya. A society will enjoy a greater degree of solidarity if it can offer social mobility and avoid wide gaps between the haves and the have-nots. A chasm between elites and commoners encourages resentment and divisiveness, thus undermining social cohesion. “Egalitarianism enables cooperation,” Turchin writes.
Finally — and Turchin does not say this explicitly until the last page, and even then only en passant — asabiya rises in the presence of an enemy. If you want more social cohesion, it will help if your society has someone nearby to threaten it, especially if the enemy doesn’t look anything like you. The existence of a (bad) “Great Other” creates the necessity for greater cooperation between members of a given society and increases social cohesion.
Turchin’s empires tended to have all three components. They were certainly religious. Being on a multiethnic frontier (basically, Huntington’s civilizational fault line) strengthened a society’s religious identity, since it made it easier to differentiate that particular society from the one on the other side of the frontier. It also introduced norms for everyone in that society to conform to. Religion played an important role in the rise of the Roman Empire, the spectacular spread of Islam, and the growth of the Russian Empire, where religion was “the glue that held Muscovite society together.”
They were also egalitarian. Whereas the core areas of societies usually had rigid hierarchies, the borders between superiors and underlings were far more porous in frontier regions, where opportunities were as plentiful as dangers, and where it was easier to make something of oneself regardless of one’s social status at birth. Additionally, during the integrative phases of egalitarian societies, ostentatious signs of class barriers were discouraged. When early Rome fell on hard times, Turchin writes, “the greatest burden was placed on the wealthy.”
And of course, fledgling empires had enemies on the other side of the metaethnic frontier. To know who you are, you must know who you are not. Budding empires never had to wonder. Metaethnic communities on the other side of the border ensured that disparate tribes along the same metaethnic continuum — tribes that were otherwise too different to coalesce if left in peace — united in the face of a common enemy that represented the Great Other.
I wouldn’t bother writing this piece if I didn’t think any of this had implications for our world today. One can argue over whether the US is an empire; it is a hegemon all the same, and its level of asabiya will affect the future of America as well as of those countries that have been drawn into its orbit. Nor does a society necessarily need to have imperial ambitions; it is not unreasonable to argue that societies with high asabiya have more potential to thrive and become flourishing polities than societies with low asabiya. But how does one define asabiya in a post-agrarian world? What goes into the asabiya of a society that belongs to the digital age? Which has greater asabiya — the atheist social democracy that is Sweden or the theocratic oligarchy of Saudi Arabia?
Things are not clear-cut. Nevertheless, you’d have had to be living on the moon over the last decade to claim the US had a high level of asabiya. For roughly half of the country, the executive branch of the government amounts to little more than the words “Let’s Go Brandon,” while the other half refused to accept the presidential results of 2016 and spent the next four years pretending Donald Trump was not their president. When half the society believes it is being lied to and manipulated by the government and the media (not without reason), while the other half believes much of their country is a flyover zone, you don’t really have great asabiya.
It is hard to gauge the overall religiosity of the US, but the ruling classes of the West in general and of America specifically have for years regarded religion as a ferocious basilisk to be tamed at all costs, and those who practice it largely as just another set of deplorables. Yet man needs to believe in something, even (and perhaps especially) in a society that can only provide meaning through consumption. Turning science into “The Science,” masks and vaccines into manifestations of chastity and virtue, and skeptics into leprous heretics, the Covid pandemic has confirmed that man cannot dispense with belief; denied faith on the plains of metaphysics, he will seek it elsewhere. Whether a restoration of religious values, if such a restoration is at all possible, will raise asabiya is unclear, but it’s impossible to escape the palpable feeling that many Western societies are drifting about aimlessly (the endless quest for new gender and sexual identities is a telltale symptom of aimlessness) and are slowly hollowing out. The dismantling of traditional values is a grave mistake; to the extent that the dismantling has been carried out intentionally by various ideological currents, it is a crime.
On the equality front, modern America is anything but egalitarian, with an enormous gap between the top one percent and the rest. The wealthy have been increasingly retreating into gated communities, where they seem to form a country unto themselves. In 2019 the average CEO in the US made 278 times the average worker; in 1965 by comparison, the ratio was only 20:1. This is a situation that has yet again been exacerbated by the pandemic, and videos of galas and fancy parties that have surfaced online showing America’s most affluent wining and dining while masked servers fleet about like shadows — such videos have only painted too vivid a picture of the unbridgeable divide between America’s privileged classes and those less fortunate.
By contrast, Turchin mentions that the only thing differentiating senators from the rest of the citizenry in early Rome was a purple stripe they wore on their togas — that sartorial flourish aside, it hardly got any more ostentatious. Moreover, Turchin points out that the richest one percent in early Rome were only 10–20 times wealthier than the average Roman, in a sense making early Rome more egalitarian than the US today. The idea that modern America is a meritocracy and anyone can become president is perhaps good propaganda for inner-city schools and vapid Hollywood movies, but not much else.
Aside from discontent among the masses, there are also signs of intra-elite competition: a growing number of wealthy people are fighting for access to a fixed number of power loci. Donald Trump was perceived as an anti-establishment figure; while certainly a political outsider, he was nevertheless an outsider with a billion-dollar fortune (Steve Bannon, Trump’s sometime “Svengali,” is another example of a fabulously wealthy anti-establishment figure). This phenomenon does not seem to be limited to the US, either. Marine Le Pen, the leader of the National Rally (France’s right-wing, populist party), also casts herself as an anti-establishment crusader, yet she inherited the party leadership from her father almost as if she were a dauphin, nor is the party leadership the only thing she stands to inherit — the Le Pen family has money, and the clan operates (or at least used to operate) from a posh estate in the wealthy Parisian enclave of Saint-Cloud.
In a word, the writing is on the wall — and the wall is showing some large cracks. Buckle up: the road ahead is likely to be bumpy, the terrain treacherous.
Does the US need an external enemy to boost its asabiya? It would be nice to think we could all coexist harmoniously, but I suspect it is only possible in a world that has truly reached the “end of history,” an idea that has had its day and does not merit a detour here. Alternatively, an existential crisis could do wonders. Turchin preempts the argument that high asabiya needs external threats by acknowledging on the last page, tongue in cheek, that some readers might conclude that nothing short of an extraterrestrial invasion is needed for the human race to present a united front. Well, we don’t need to reach for the stars; Wuhan is a lot closer. Yet the external threat of a bad respiratory virus has only made the US — and other Western nations — even more polarized (admittedly, there is the matter of the Covid threat having been blown spectacularly, hysterically out of proportion, but still).
Perhaps there are more positive ways to unite people and increase social cohesion. One highly intelligent American pundit I follow believes that space exploration might serve as an overarching project that could give Americans a sense of purpose and usher in a new, flourishing America (though the pundit insists this is contingent on ejecting the Left from power). It doesn’t matter whether space exploration efforts lead anywhere, he says; the important thing is to have a purpose. If it sounds utopian, one could do a lot worse.
Regardless, whoever is serious about governing a Western country (the vast majority of Western leaders at present are not to be taken seriously) should take note. No empire lasts forever, but Turchin shows that historical cycles can be long-drawn-out. At a minimum, a society needs to spend several centuries on a very intense metaethnic frontier to develop high asabiya. As mentioned, though, this applies to pre-industrial societies. Ours is a digital one. Modern technology speeds everything up; can it also speed up historical processes? Technology is the ultimate wild card, and one that can affect the duration of the decline of the US. Will America sink to the socioeconomic level of Brazil and linger there for centuries, or will it disintegrate in the next decade or two? Whatever the outcome, the next crop of leaders — serious leaders, that is — had better get serious about asabiya. It will be more productive than waiting for an asteroid or an alien invasion.
