Life is the School of Hard Knocks, for Societies Too! By Brian Simpson
As the mouse utopia experiments in the 1960s of psychologist John Calhoun showed, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_sink, too many comforts lead to softness and decadence, and social decline. This has been recognised since the time of the ancient Greek philosophers, and no doubt at a practical level long before this. An extended argument has also been given by Anthony Esolen, No Apologies: Why Civilization Depends Upon the Strength of Men, (Regnery Gateway, 2022).
Further support of this position has been made by a recently published study in Nature, which looked at 30,000 years of human history. It was found that stress and disturbances which did not destroy a society outright, made the society stronger by producing resilience. It is much like a biological adaptation mechanism, and that certainly applies at the individual level. Even by not getting vaxxed, and "embracing" Covid-19, I found natural immunity, and a resistance to all the variants that came. A multi-vaxxed Covid infected person even coughed on me, and I was fine! The same process seems to be operating at a social level.
So, does it mean that the storm and stress we now face will make Western society stronger? As Esolen argues, that all depends upon whether or not men rise to the challenge. The future is in our hands.
https://phys.org/news/2024-05-historical-hard-human-societies-term.html
"Frequent disturbances to human societies boost the ability of populations to resist and recover from subsequent downturns, a Nature paper indicates. The study, which analyzes 30,000 years of human history, has implications for future population growth and resilience and for contemporary resilience-building initiatives.
Resilience, the ability to withstand and recover after crises, is critical to the well-being and continued existence of all human societies. A large amount of research has focused on resilience in the present, but the factors that underlie long-term resilience have been less well studied.
To address this imbalance, Philip Riris and colleagues have quantified patterns of prehistoric population resistance to environmental or cultural disturbances. Their meta-analysis spans a 30,000-year time period and draws data from 16 locations across the globe.
They find that the frequency of downturns increases the ability of populations to withstand and recover from disturbances. The effect is strongly modulated by land-use patterns: farming and herding societies are more vulnerable to population-reducing crises, but they are also more resilient overall.
The study has parallels with ecology, in which frequent natural disturbances are thought to enhance the long-term resilience of key ecosystem services. In addition, the authors suggest that humanity's long-term population growth may have been sustained at least in part by positive feedback cycles of vulnerability, resistance and recovery.
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