I’m not an unqualified supporter of quantitative modeling in the social sciences, most certainly do I have my doubts about modeling in history. It’s a dangerous business and the results have been spotty at best. Yet, it could work for some sorts of analyses and doing it in a disciplined way would allow rejection or modification of the model. We can read about a seemingly successful application of quantitative modeling technique as applied to the spread of large-scale societies, proto-states and states, in the region of Europe and Asia and Africa. That successful application is discussed in an article by a geneticist, Razib Khan, who blogs at Ron Unz’s website, The Unz Review: An Alternative Media Selection and subtitled: A Collection of Interesting, Important, and Controversial Perspectives Largely Excluded from the American Mainstream Media.
Khan’s article, Modeling World History in Math Is Possible, is a commentary upon an article summarizing results of a research project: War, space, and the evolution of Old World complex societies.
Khan displays six graphs in his article which he says show “the major result: a model with only a few simple parameters was incredibly good at fitting the genuine growth and evolution of complex societies over 3,000 years.” (Actually, both Khan’s article and that by Peter Turchin and the other researchers make it clear they are interested in the spread of sophisticated military technology and centralized political systems of the sort we would call `states’.)
This model of an important part of human history is essentially a model covering external environments, such as proximity to the types of grasslands which nurture nomadic and semi-nomadic horsemen who have developed much of the military technology and fighting methods of Eurasia and northern Africa and have forced the development of other military technologies and fighting methods.
The model was used to predict “the historical distribution of large-scale societies in Afroeurasia during 1,500 BCE-1,500 CE” and to also develop maps “indicating the frequency and distribution of large-scale societies.” The authors were interested in such matters because of their concern with the large size which can support rational bureaucracies and sophisticated educational systems. Again, the model produced the right results based upon the assumptions about the importance of nomadic horsemen from the great grassland regions in initiating the movement toward advanced military technology and large societies with centralized political, bureaucratic systems. Apparently, their model was successful in regions such as south China and Europe which were not directly contiguous to such grasslands because the model allowed for the diffusion of military technology into, say, most of Europe from the Near Eastern and northern African regions which were contiguous to such regions and were sometimes conquered and were sometimes able to adopt the horsemen’s military technology or perhaps to develop their own superior military technology which allowed, along with the political controls which are part of what we know as `states’, successful defense against the horsemen such as the Mongols and Turkmen and Berber peoples.
Neither the authors nor Khan are making a claim that human history is deterministic in a simpleminded way. They are simply claiming that such models can allow a more exact understanding and an objective way of testing claims about human history. (In another article, Human History Is Both Contingent and Inevitable, Khan argues for a far more sophisticated view in which the world is contingent in some ways and fully determined in other ways. Still other articles on his blog take up similar issues.)
I endorse the development of well-formed quantitative models, though I feel they will only be useful, and only avoid misleading the naive, for very well-formed ideas which can be tested and clearly rejected or modified or accepted. The problem, and it’s related to the more general form of the problem the researchers dealt with, is that no one has the sort of overview available in gravitational theory (the theory of general relativity) or other fields of physics where very successful quantitative models are made possible by criteria the models should meet. Without a greater understanding, it can be dangerous to rely too heavily on models because they produce `accurate’ answers to specific questions or to questions under particular conditions. I’ve read a couple introductory works on mathematical modeling and found the practitioners who develop models over a variety of domains to be more skeptical than would be true of other mathematicians or scientists. Models which are built by rigorous application of physical laws should work but those which are built upon empirical results often break when different facts are considered or when the future simply proves different from the past or present.
Yet, the model of the growth of large-scale societies under consideration seems to deal well with the initialization of one very important process: the formation of centralized states with sophisticated military technology.
But, again, we have to be wary of answers to questions about human history which merely preserve the known phenomena. We moderns tend to misunderstand the history of human science and human thought and to think there was some reason the ancient and Medieval thinkers could have realized it was `wrong’ to place the Earth at the center of the Cosmos as they knew it. (There were speculative developments of alternative models but no clear arguments why they might be superior.) The models of the Cosmos overthrown by Kepler and Galileo and Newton were quite successful, especially the mathematically rigorous model originally developed by the Macedonian-Egyptian mathematician Ptolemy. Those pre-Galilean models preserved the known phenomena and, in fact, were quite successful in predicting the movements of planets and could have been extended, in principle, to planetary moons and comets and the like at the cost of greater complexity. Ultimately, modern physics overthrew Ptolemaic models of the relative movements of the Sun and planets because it had far greater power than was necessary to merely provide a more economical model of the Solar system. Modern physics, beginning in a systematic way with Newton’s dynamics, has proven itself to be both a qualitative and quantitative understanding of certain very important aspects of concrete being. It was not any gains in model accuracy of planetary movements that forced the adoption of Newtonian dynamics but rather the fact that Newton’s physics worked as well with cannon balls as it did with predicting the movements of the moon.
This was the modern re-adoption and rational modification of the ancient program of understanding all that exists by a single system of thought.
Arguably, and I tend to think this way, physics as we know it is—or can, in principle, be corrected and expanded to be—a complete understanding of aspects of concrete being, including at least the quantitative aspects. That doesn’t mean physics is a `complete’ understanding of concrete or thing-like being, nor will any human science be a complete understanding of any specific realm of concrete being. In fact, the abstract being from which thing-like being was shaped is still here with us and continues to interact with the more abstract sorts of being from which it was shaped. This concrete realm of concrete being is not yet complete and is being made richer and more complex even by very acts of human exploration of Creation and by all other relationships which continue to bring concrete being into existence and to shape it.
Let me end with a few comments about what I think will be involved in providing a wider understanding for human nature as part of a greater Creation; such a wider understanding will give us not magical answers to every question about human history or human moral problems but rather a general context in which our human being is set as well as ways of properly phrasing our questions and properly developing our proposed answers.
I think we have to keep in mind that there are deterministic forms of relationships and contingent forms of relationships. There is a different balance of such relationships, and differing relationships in their details, for each of: individual human being, communal human being, and external environments. In addition, human being both individual and communal have a peculiar and very important type of contingency—that which is part of moral freedom.
I discussed the quest to gain a “more exact understanding” of man in a book I published in 2013, A More Exact Understanding of Human Being, which is available for free downloading. The title is from Pope Benedict XVI (Joseph Ratzinger):
Modernity is not simply a historically-datable cultural phenomenon; in reality it requires a new focus, a more exact understanding of the nature of man. [Pope Benedict XVI, in a speech given on 2008/06/07 to participants in the sixth European Symposium of University Professors, which was held in Rome from 2008/06/04 to 2008/06/07 on the theme: “Broadening the Horizons of Reason. Prospects for Philosophy”.]
I would recommend a review or first-time reading of one of my recent essays: Adopting Mathematical Reasoning in Non-quantitative Fields of Thought.