8.

HOW
CREATIVITY
CEASES

As we have already seen, there have been many cases in history, where creative people or nations like Athens, Rome and others were stopped in their tracks. So how does that generally happen? Does every story have its own, unique explanation or are there some general patterns that are frequently repeated?

The answers to both questions is yes. Yes, every story is unique in some ways, but yes, there are also repetitive patterns, and we shall soon look at these.

One element that varies a great deal is the length of time it takes a society to break down. The decay and collapse of Homo floresiensis, some 12,000 years ago, was apparently extremely slow, and while the collapse of the Neanderthals may seem quick on archaeological timescales, it probably still took thousands of years.

Here is a more recent example: thirty years after Europeans first reached Tasmania in 1642, they discovered scattered groups of people, but these people lived largely like animals. For instance, despite the island’s cold and often snowy winters, they never lit a fire because they didn’t know how to do that. And except for some fur pieces that they wore over their shoulders, they had no clothes but rubbed instead themselves with smelly grease to keep the cold at bay.

Although they often lived close to the coast, they never constructed even the simplest boat. Nor could they fish from the shore, despite the fact that plenty of fish could be seen here; they could neither make a string, a hook nor a net. In fact, these people had almost no tools at all – not even extremely simple bone and stone tools such as those used by the Aboriginal people of Australia or elsewhere in the early Stone Age.

Obviously the Europeans wondered why the locals had completely failed to develop a civilization, not to mention even the most basic Stone Age tools.⁹⁰ However, the surprise only grew as they later discovered, through archaeological excavations, that the deeper they dug the more (and better) tools they found. Indeed, the oldest objects showed that the first people who had emigrated from Australia to Tasmania, had indeed known how to sail, fish, make bonfires and much more. So over thousands of years, their culture had been in steady decay until by the arrival of Europeans, virtually nothing was left.

The explanation for the Tasmanian decline was almost certainly that they had been isolated after sea-levels rose. The same was true, to a lesser extent, for the Australian Aboriginals, who had also become cut off from the rest of the world. Their culture had also declined, but less so because they were on a bigger landmass and thus included more people.

THE LAST FOUR FULL-BLOODED TASMANIANS, PHOTOGRAPHED AROUND 1860. THE LAST TASMANIAN TO SURVIVE IS SITTING TO THE RIGHT.

Slow, grinding declines similar to that of the Tasmanians have been seen in many other places that were isolated, and there is every indication that if your social space reduces to below a certain critical mass, decline is inevitable. Such isolation can happen because of religious or political views that isolate small groups of people, but the most common factor is geographical isolation, where there simply aren’t any other people within reach. Social isolation happened, for instance, to the Montagnards in Vietnam, the Tierre del Fuego Indians, the Scottish highlanders, the natives in the Canary Islands and, of course, to the Easter Islanders, and the result was, in each case, decline. The Inuit that the Europeans found in Canada had descended from people who had lived in permanent stone houses, had caught the great whales on the open water and had dog sleds, harpoons, toys and boats. But they had entirely forgotten all of this by the time Europeans showed up. What they found were a people who couldn’t hunt large animals in the ocean, who lived in primitive snow huts and who no longer managed to store enough food to stay in the same place.⁹¹

The typical reason for a very slow decline is extreme isolation, but others who were less isolated, but had become highly centralized also decayed from within and then met their nemesis abruptly. When the Spaniards arrived in South America, the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés conquered the Aztec empire with just 530 soldiers and Francisco Pizarro took the Incas with 168 men and 62 horses. In reality, the Aztecs were crushed within two years and the Incas within five, despite the fact that these two civilizations had a total of 37 million inhabitants against a combined Spanish invasion force of approximately 1,000 soldiers. On average, each Spaniard overcame 37,000 Indians. When Cortés conquered Mexico, he brought just over 500 soldiers, 100 sailors and 16 horses, who quickly subjugated around 30 million inhabitants. Here, each Spanish invader took on 50,000 locals.

We have already studied the Roman Empire’s fall - it was slower and lasted approximately 70 years from the time where barbarians crossed the Rhine in the year 406, to 476, when they took final control of Rome despite being heavily outnumbered. However, most of the empire’s dissolution occurred over a period of just 15 years.

And then there’s the British Empire which, at its peak in 1913, covered around one-fifth of the planet’s surface. Who then could have imagined what Britain would look like in 1975? By then, almost all of the country’s empire had disappeared, and UK had over a million unemployed, an inflation rate of 24% and a debt it could not pay. In fact, in 1976 the International Monetary Fund (IMF) had to step in with an emergency loan of £2.3 billion to prevent bankruptcy.

Few collapses have been as speedy as those of the communist regimes. When the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauescu was re-elected as the country’s leader in October 1989, he received, literally, an hour-long applause - no one dared to be the first to stop clapping, so it just went on and on. A year later, he had been executed and the Romanian Communist Party dissolved. The rest of the communist regimes collapsed at similar speeds, after which came followed massive crime waves and a number of civil wars.

As these examples show, there are vast differences in the speeds of human decline. However, some of these examples were pre-civilization (and Homo floresiensis were not even humans), but if we focus on how civilizations decline, the recurring patterns become clearer.

One of the people who saw this best is American professor Carroll Quigley, to whom Bill Clinton referred when he announced his first presidential candidacy and when he later gave his inauguration speech. In a nutshell Quigley had taught at Harvard, Princeton and Georgetown universities and focused most of his research on the drivers of civilizations – on why they arise, flourish, go into crisis and disappear.⁹²

Quigley found that the basic requirement for a new, viable civilization was strong incentives and distinct possibilities to innovate and accumulate capital (when the UK economy disintegrated in 1975, the marginal tax rate on earned income was 83% and it was 98% on investment profits, so that would explain a good deal). It was also important, he pointed out, and that their population were not stuck in dreams of the past or in excessive attachments to old rules and traditions, and that they had an optimistic culture.

Clinton included specific reference to the latter point (optimism) in his inaugural speech to the Democratic convention in 1992, where he quoted Quigley for highlighting that the US was great because people not only worked for a better future, they also expected one.

Quigley explained how civilizations very often moved through various stages, which he called “mixture, gestation, expansion, age of conflict, universal empire, decay and invasion”. Below is a little model which is inspired heavily by him, but somewhat simplified (five steps instead of eight) and with different terms:

New civilizations typically start because of creative mixing. For instance, England had creative mixing of Celts, Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Jews, Normans and so on and the Romans experienced their take-off after mixing their ideas with Greek ones.

Nest stage is expansion (the Romans and Britons were both really very good at that). Expansion can be military, but it can also simply be economic – you buy assets rather than conquering them. This is what the Chinese have done recently.

All seems fine here, but then comes the inevitable internal decay. Caroll Quigley largely attributed this to what he called “over-institutionalization” but, as we shall discuss in detail is sections four to six, it’s a lot more than just that. However, the over-institutionalisation certainly is a big part of the problem, and one of the best known economists to analyse the mechanics of this is Mancur Olson, who is one of the most-cited economists of all time. In his classic book, The Rise and Decline of Nations, he asked why Japan and Germany, both gutterly destroyed during World War II, could have such magnificent booms afterwards.⁹³

His answer was in line with Quigleys thinking: that civilization will inevitably over-institutionalize and that a war, terrible as it otherwise is, also liberates nations by destroying excessive institutions.

Olson argued that over-institutionalization largely happened because of accumulation of ever-more special interests and privileges to protect against competition. In addition, to that came endless growth of bureaucracies, which would typically create countless committees and subcommittees, and these would slow each other down. In fact, other economists studying poor countries have shown that overgrown bureaucracy can be a main reason why they never can take off. One study showed, for instance, that if you wanted to buy and register a building permit on a piece of government property in Cairo, it demanded 77 bureaucratic procedures involving 31 government offices and up to 14 years of waiting!⁹⁴ In Peru, economist Hernando de Soto tried, as an experiment, to open a small clothing shop in the outskirts of Lima in compliance with all statutory provisions. This took 289 days. Later, he tried to gain permission to build on state-owned land, which took six years and 11 months and involved contact with 52 different government agencies.⁹⁵

A third important phenomenon contributed to silting, according to Olson: public organizations were originally created to solve real problems but, over time, their real priority often became to help themselves. They became self-serving and extractive, in other words; they sucked blood out of society and hindered voluntary win-win transactions. And unlike private companies, they seemed to live forever. As US Senator James F. Byrnes once said: “The nearest approach to immortality on Earth is a government bureau.”

The overall consequence of such silting is increasing share of involuntary win-lose and even lose-lose transactions. In addition, the process creates an overall cultural change, where more and more citizens become “rent-seekers”, specializing in exploiting existing wealth rather than creating it.

Back to Quigley. At some point, he said, a civilization might have its heyday of grandeur without major threat. This phase can easily be deceptive, he said, because this is where the civilization may seem strongest on the surface, but where it may actually be calcifying. The Nazis managed to see their forces march through the Arc de Triomphe in Paris before they were defeated five years later. Similarly, the Roman Empire seemed to be at its peak during the five emperors from 96 AD to 180, where they among, other things, built the Colosseum and the Pantheon. The Sputnik program was, in a way, the Communist Colosseum and many in the West believed at the time that the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was on track to surpass the West.

Grandeur will often be followed by collapse, which can happen fast, if the ageing civilization collides with another civilization that is the dynamic stage two. If it doesn’t, it just withers away slowly. The fall of Rome was fast and the demise of the Incas, Aztecs, Mexicans and Warsaw Pact communists even faster.

Here is another of Quigley’s observations: the most dynamic parts of a civilization are typically its outlying areas (those that most recently introduced its ideas). The reason is simple: These areas are typically still in the hyper-dynamic phase two where they enjoy strong growth and enthusiasm, while those who have had civilization for longer, will be more silted and therefore more likely to be in phase three or well on their way to phase five.

Western civilization spread to the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and it has most recently been widely adopted in some Asian markets which are now in phase two. Where European nations are now predominantly in phase three (and some Southern European nations arguably in phase five and only avoiding collapse because of life-support from the EU), one sees higher dynamics in the markets that have recently introduced many elements of Western civilization - countries like Taiwan, South Korea, Chile, Poland and, since 1980, China. Similarly, the younger Western nations like the US, Canada and Australia are today more dynamic than Western Europe. But the threats are the same, and those nations that do not sense all of them now will probably do so in the not-so-distant future. They comprise cults of decline, overinstitutionalization and enemies of enlightenment, and it is these that we shall address in sections four to six. However, long before we get to that, we shall, in the next chapter, study why only Western Europe became hyper-creative, because while this story tells us about how creativity happens in practice, it also shows how it can be halted in real life. That part is a horror story.