When Complex Systems Go “Boom”

Niall Ferguson writes about Complexity and Collapse: Empires on the Edge of Chaos in the latest Foreign Affairs. Ferguson is a historian and a cracking – if controversial – writer. Yet for his obvious sympathies to historians, his argument in this latest article is a caution to our retrospectively anchored predictive capacities. He writes,

Most of the fat-tail phenomenon that historians study are not the climaxes of prolonged and deterministic story lines; instead, they represent perturbations, and sometimes the complete breakdowns, of complex systems.

Complexity theory has been borrowed from other disciplines, the natural sciences among them. The key insight is the distinction between complicated systems and complex systems. In a complicated system, the unit can be parsed and dissected: think of an internal combustion engine. A complex system is has organic interdependencies that mean one or another part of the system cannot be removed and examined without altering the matrix as a whole: think of the human brain. The instinct behind the Millennium Development Goals, among others, is a complex systems theory instinct: we cannot tackle one or another of these problems, they are a coherent system that must be moved incrementally in total, not simply tackled one piece at a time. Bob Goudzwaard calls this the interlocking nature of global crises .

Ferguson writes that when things go wrong in a complex system, the scale of disruption is nearly impossible to anticipate. As such, there is the tendency to move from stability to instability quite suddenly. Ferguson projects this is our imperial moment. And the critical node in the adaptability of the current world system is what he calls confidence.

In imperial crises, it is not the material underpinnings of power that really matter but expectations about future power… it is this shift that is crucial: a complex adaptive system is in big trouble when its component parts lose faith in its viability.

Ultimately he argues it is the privilege of historians to retrospectively portray the process of imperial dissolution as slow acting, with multiple overdetermining causes. Rather, empires behave like all complex adaptive systems. They function in apparent equilibrium for some unknowable period. And then, quite abruptly, they collapse. The shift from consummation to destruction and then to desolation is not cyclical. It is sudden.