On Asabiya

Recently, I read an extremely insightful book by Peter Turchin, named "War and Peace and War," which examines the cycles of imperial nations. This book seeks to examine what it is that makes empires rise (and fall), and does so in an exemplary fashion. In reading the book, I could not help but reflect upon my own dislikes of the center and my love of the periphery in the cultures I inhabit, and this book deals with those issues as well. The word asabiya itself comes from the pivotal work on Magreb (that would be North African) political cycles by the historian Ibn Kahldun. Asabiya, in English, roughly translates to "social capital," or the sum total of social forces holding a society and its institutions (political, social, familial) together.

Empires, apparently without exception, come from those frontier regions on the edge of what are termed "metaethnic fault lines." The situation of bordering entirely alien civilizations causes an extremely tight "us-against-them" mentality that leads to high levels of social cohesion, allowing large scale businesses and socieities to develop. The same may be true in religious groups as well, and is a subject worthy of further personal study in that regard (For example, can the Church of God and the wider Sabbatarian and Messianic movements be considered on the meta-religious fault line of Christianity, and if so, does that mean that right now we are on the downward slide of an asabiya cycle? More on that later.). Asabiya is apparently acquired through that survival instinct that forces social conflict to be submerged in the face of a grave and common threat where high levels of egalitarianism and high levels of sacrifice among leaders reduce the problems of rivalry and social division. In the absence of such external threats, the selfish acquisition of wealth and power (and the rising inequality between the elite and common population of a society) reduces asabiya and leads to periods of social disintigration (such as what is currently going on in the United States, and what has gone on in Southern Italy, to name one famous example, for the last 2000 or so years). Certain practices, like slavery, appear to lead to "asabiya black holes" in the words of Turchin, which explains why the southern part of the US, with its low asabiya, has such poor wages and such a dismal political record (See in particular the state of Louisiana, the last "core" of the southern slaveholding culture before the civil war, which still shows large amounts of corruption, a sign of low asabiya.).

Core regions of a given society develop because of high asabiya, but the increase of imperial territory inevitably brings the frontiers far beyond the core (for reasons of safety and security, empires do not like their capitals/cores to be in periphery regions). The movement of frontiers beyond the core region mean that the forces that once brought unity to a people leave elsewhere. Through cycles of rising and falling social cohesion, an empire gradually loses steam, and eventually crumbles in what is termed, appropriately enough, imperialpathosis. Once a critical amount of asabiya is lost, an empire is finished. It is only in the frontier regions on either side of the fault lines (which move based on the performance of societies along the fault lines) that new imperial peoples gradually develop. Metaethnic lines are not to be trifled with. Consider, for example, the difference between Israel and its neighbors. Israel is a democratic, secular, Western nation, and its neighbors are highly corrupt, often intensely fundamentalist, and not particularly enlightened in their social views or their terroristic behavior. The border between Israel and its neighbors is a metaethnic line similar to those between the Mediterranean society Israel springs from and the uncultured barbarians who viewed its wealth and power jealously but who did not wish to become civilized themselves. (Incidentally enough, the Arabs did become civilized during the time they were on the outside of the metaethnic fault line between Mediterranean and Persian civilizations and the outside barbarians, but their civilization fell apart before the Turkic and Mongol invasions, followed by European colonization, and it is only recently when their asabiya has risen again as a result of the new fault lines, though it appears not to have civilized them again, yet).

What I found most interesting about the book and its contrast between core regions and peripheries, is that the book managed to pull together two strands in my own thinking. One strand was my personal preference for being far away from core regions, to be a border dweller (something that, not surprisingly, is apparently a longstanding family trait among my ancestors, who long dwelt in frontier regions in Europe and the US), far away from the centers of power. For it is in frontiers, when one is faced with alien and hostile enemies, that one learns how to join together with others for survival and finds the greatest social cohesion. However, the link with the second strand, my firm and strident concern for egalitarianism as opposed to social stratification, gives the moral justification for this preference. In periphery regions, the fierce conflict between at the fault lines leaves a low population (i.e. not many people survive there) that is so engaged in fierce struggle that they do not have the time to engage in pettier differentiation or in the hoarding of goods that separate the haves and have-nots. Instead, everyone is in it together. In core regions, by contrast, elites show off their wealth and power and engage in all sorts of petty intra-elite competitions for power and its accutrements that serve to embitter the less privileged majority of groups and distract those elites from their task of holding together their society/civilization. In other words, they fiddle while Rome burns, and they live in luxury while the legions who dwell roughly and in poverty protect the empire from the barbarian hordes across the wall/river/desert. This breeds a lot of well-earned resentment.

The well-organized and presented thoughts from Mr. Turchin should give those dwellers of core regions a lot of pause. Too often, especially in periods of declining asabiya, power is seen not for how it can serve the people, but how it can serve the officeholder, and this leads to a lot of popular cynicism that leads people to focus energy on civic duties and more energy on getting ahead themselves, which, as the "knave mentality" furthers the decline in asabiya and destroys the society from within, leaving it vulnerable to any more cohesive rival on its borders. Others, the "saints," will serve even as everyone else takes advantage, getting taken advantage of without any gain to the society they thanklessly help. It is those in the middle, the "moralists," of which I am one, who seek to punish and condemn the knaves, and in so doing reduce the cynicism of others and allow for social cohesion to develop once again. The book gave an excellent framework for some very interesting ideas, and his analysis of the modern world empires (the USA, Europe, the Middle East, Russia, and China) is frightening and dead-on. In other words, this is an exceedingly good book, and one which relates to a great many subjects on my mind.