The Next Decade Could Be Even Worse

The Next Decade Could Be Even Worse
Dec 2020    by Graeme Wood
Original: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/12/can-history-predict-future/616993/

Peter Turchin, one of the world’s experts（世界级的） on pine beetles (松甲虫) and possibly also on human beings(在研究人类上也是如此/对人类好像也很有研究), met me reluctantly this summer on the campus of the University of Connecticut at Storrs (康涅狄格大学/康大), where he teaches. Like many people during the pandemic, he preferred to limit his（尽量减少/避免和人们） human contact. He also doubted （他也觉得和人接触不一定有很大价值/他还怀疑与人接触是否还有意义/他不知道...） whether human contact （和人接触）would have much value anyway, （毕竟有了他的数学模型）when his mathematical models // （this） could already tell me everything I needed to know. （不论我想知道什么，都可以有答案）1

But he had to leave his office sometime（他总要出去走走/他不能老呆在办公室里）. (（他跟我说，...）“One way you know I am Russian is（我们俄罗斯人总要） that I cannot think sitting down（动一动才能思考）,” he told me. “I have to go for a walk.（必须要出去走一走）”) Neither of us had seen much of anyone since the pandemic（疫情开始之后我们两个都没见过什么人） had closed the country（几个月前就开始全国封控了） several months before. / The campus was quiet. “A week ago, it was even more like a neutron bomb（中子弹，让学校变成鬼城） hit,” Turchin said. Animals were timidly（小心地/逐渐地/一点一点） reclaiming（占领/不是重新占领） the campus, he said: squirrels, woodchucks (土拨鼠), deer, even an occasional red-tailed hawk (红尾鹰). During our walk, groundskeepers(后勤老师) and a few kids on skateboards were the only other representatives of the human population in sight. 2 我们散着步，看到几个管理员，几个孩子在玩滑板。此外就没有别的人了。

The year 2020 has been kind to Turchin（2020年对于图尔钦来说过得还不错）, for many of the same reasons （一个同样的事情有不同的影响） // it has been hell for the rest of us（其他人则饱受煎熬）. Cities on fire（就是着火）, elected leaders（民选领导人） endorsing violence（支持暴力事件）, homicides surging（杀人案件激增）— to a normal American（对于普通美国人来说）, these are apocalyptic signs（好像是末日要来了）. To Turchin, they indicate that his models, which incorporate thousands of years of data about human history, are working.（而对于图尔钦来说，他根据人类历史上千年来积累的数据正在起效）(“Not all of human history,” he corrected me once. “Just the last 10,000 years.”) He has been warning for a decade that a few key social and political trends portend an “age of discord,（充满纷争的时代）” civil unrest and carnage（动乱和流血事件） worse than most Americans have experienced（比大多数美国人见过的都要惨烈）. In 2010, he predicted（预示着） that the unrest would get serious around 2020（动乱在2020年将会变得严重）, and that it wouldn’t let up until those social and political trends reversed（相关的政治趋势不逆转，动荡就不会停息。）. Havoc at the level of the late 1960s and early’70s（出现六十年代末，七十年代初的动荡） is the best-case scenario（至少/最轻是这样）; all-out civil war is the worst.（最坏的情况就是全面内战/全面内战也不是不可能） 3 

The fundamental problems, he says, are a dark triad of social maladies:maladies（三大弊病）: a bloated elite class,class（精英阶层膨胀）, with too few elite jobs to go around;around（精英工作岗位不够）; declining living standards among the general population;population（普通大众生活水平不断下降）; and a government that can’t cover its financial positions.positions（政府财政入不敷出）. His models, which track these factorsfactors（three maladies） in other societies across history,history(历史上其他社会的这些因素), are too complicated to explain in a nontechnical publication.publication（模型本身太复杂，用非技术性文字解释不了）. But they’ve succeeded in impressing writers for nontechnical publications,publications(但他们让非专业读者印象深刻/很受震撼), and have won him comparisons to other authors of “megahistories,megahistories,” such as Jared Diamond and Yuval Noah Harari.Harari. The New York Times columnist Ross Douthat had once found Turchin’s historical modeling unpersuasive, but 2020 made him a believer:believer(2020年，他信了/他服了): “At this point,” Douthat recently admitted on a podcast, “I feel like you have to pay a little more attention to him.”（我现在确实得关注他了） 4

Diamond and Harari aimed to describe the history of humanity. Turchin looks into a distant, science-fiction future for peers. In（不要上来就说“在...”） War and Peace and War (2006),(2006年出版的《战争-和平-战争》这样一本最易懂的书中) his most accessible book, he likens himself to Hari Seldon,Seldon（他把自己比作哈利·谢顿）, the “maverick mathematician”mathematician（独行侠）” of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series (阿西莫夫的《基地》系列科幻小说), who can foretell the rise and fall of empires. In those 10,000 years’ worth of data, Turchin believes he has found iron laws that dictate the fates of human societies.societies（他用一万年的数据找到了人类社会的铁律）. 5

The fate of our own society, he says, is not going to be pretty, at least in the near term. “It’s too late,” he told me as we passed Mirror Lake, which UConn’ss（康大） website describes as a favorite place for students to “read, relax, or ride on the wooden swing.”(经过镜湖的时候) The problems are deep and structural—not the type that the tedioustedious(冗长的/漫长的/缓慢的) process of democratic changechange（民主改革） can fix in time to forestall mayhem.mayhem（是来不及阻止危害发生的）. Turchin likens America to a huge ship headed directly for an iceberg:iceberg（图尔钦把美国比作一艘朝着冰山驶去的大船）: “If you have a discussion among the crew about which way to turn,turn （如果你还在和船员争论船只走向）, you will not turn in time,time（你会来不及转向）, and you hit the iceberg directly.” The past 10 years or so have been discussion.discussion（过去十年就是在这样争论）. That sickening crunch you now hear—hear（刺耳的声音嘎嘎作响）—steel twisting,twisting （钢梁扭曲）, rivets popping—popping（铆钉蹦出）— is the sound of the ship hitting the iceberg.iceberg（船已经撞上冰山）. 6

“We are almost guaranteed” five hellishhelish years,years (未来还会有五年很难熬的日子), Turchin predicts, and likely a decade or more.more（甚至还有十年或者更久）. The problem, he says, is that there are too many people like me. “You are ruling class,”（他说） he said, with no more rancorrancor（他在说“你是统治阶级”的时候语气很平淡，就好像） than if he had informed me that I had brown hair, or a slightly newer iPhone than his.his（我的头发是棕色，或者你的iphone比他新一样）. Of the three factors driving social violence, Turchin stresses most heavily “elite overproduction”（精英阶层膨胀/精英过剩）— the tendency ofof（这个趋势就是） a society’s ruling classes to grow faster than the number of positions for their members to fill.fill（一个社会的统治阶层扩张速度太快，导致工作岗位不足）. 7 One way for a ruling class to grow is biologically—think of Saudi Arabia, where princes and princesses are born faster than royal roles can be created for them. In the United States, elites over produce themselves through economic and educational upward mobility: More and more people get rich, and more and more get educated. Neither of these sounds bad on its own. Don’t we want everyone to be rich and educated? The problems begin when money and Harvard degrees become like royal titles in Saudi Arabia. If lots of people have them, but only some have real power, the ones who don’t have power eventually turn on the ones who do. 8