The Long Wave: Metamorphosis and The Age of Love

Old story, new tricks

Sometime in the eighth century BCE, around the time that Homer wandered nearby isles, Hesiod too was composing a great poem, Works and Days. In a few brief lines of verse, he described the vastest stretches of time, the ages of man from the Age of Gold to the Age of Iron.

In keeping with his era, Hesiod freely mixed realism and myth — the lives of mortals and gods — yet his work still represents an early attempt to trace a longue durée pattern in the evolution of human societies. Writing almost a millennium later, Ovid would take up the theme of the ages in his epic Metamorphoses, this time folding in materialist explanations of how innovations in commerce, transportation, and technology underpinned each age. In the Golden Age, writes Ovid, humankind had no knowledge of shipbuilding, and therefore didn’t sail for distant shores; no ploughshare, and therefore didn’t practice agriculture. In telling how all that changed, Ovid gives an account of the transformations of man and materials — forever hand in hand.

This language has persisted, with changes, in modern scientific disciplines. Archeologists still divide the pre-literary history of Eurasia into the familiar Stone Age, Bronze Age, and Iron Age, taking a page from the classical authors in emphasizing the mastery of matter in the account of human progress.

Human beings are chronic pattern seekers. Our cognition depends on them and always has. So eager is this habit of perception that we will see patterns even when they aren’t there — a face in the clouds, a threat in the reeds, or a winning streak in a pair of lucky socks. The appeal of patterns is evident. A good pattern, properly apprehended, affords predictive power, and prediction affords advantage. Seeing where things are going allows a swordsman to parry an attack, an entrepreneur to get ahead of the market. Existentially, perhaps we need the comfort we derive from describing an order in the seething swirl of our lives and universe.

Towards the close of 1920, a Soviet researcher called Nikolai Kondratieff was hunting a pattern. He was interested in the progress of societies, but he had something unavailable to Hesiod: namely, the dismal science of economics. Poring over historical data on prices, interest rates and foreign trade across Europe, Kondratieff thought he could see a pulse running through capitalist economies; prices did not jerk about randomly but followed long curves that recurred with an almost musical regularity. Kondratieff’s “Theory of Long Waves” posited cycles that expressed themselves over a period of about half a century, carrying massive momentum that reshaped the contours of nations every time. Their very breadth and heft had made them difficult to detect; one had to take a step back to take in their full shape. Kondratieff’s methods were economic, but the implications of his theory went far beyond, since each wave eventually submerged all levels of society, imprinting not only a mode of production but a new hierarchy of value.

As Kondratieff saw it, each wave was set off by a radical innovation, some wonder of applied science that gave rise to a cluster of interlinked technologies and industries. The businesses that led these industries became household names during the cycle and determined a new way of living. Each wave resulted in an expansion of world economic relations, linking people and markets more profusely across wider spaces. For Kondratieff, the economic depressions that arrived at the conclusion of these big waves were not market failures, but rather necessary “winters” that cleared out obsolete industries and prepared the ground for the next technological spring.

The interbellum Russian leadership initially supported Kondratieff’s research, and he achieved a measure of international renown. But his theory contained a fatal ideological flaw: it seemed to suggest that capitalism, far from heading toward inevitable collapse as Marxist doctrine indicated, might instead possess its own self-renewing cycles that could theoretically continue indefinitely. He was fired from his position as director of the Institute of Conjuncture in 1928, while Stalin went ahead with his catastrophic implementation of a planned economy. Kondratieff was sent first to the gulags, then to his death. For a time, his ideas languished with him in the oblivion of the Great Purge.

But then came Joseph Schumpeter. Urbane, erudite, and splendidly dressed, Schumpeter possessed one of the most provocative minds of the twentieth century. His life was marked by three marriages, a transcontinental migration from his native Austria to Harvard via England, Egypt and Germany, and a phenomenally prolific scholarly output that would come to reshape economic thought. Schumpeter developed an almost novelistic gaze on the essential drama of capitalism: its relentless cycle of creation and destruction. While his contemporaries fixated on static market theories, Schumpeter could see that capitalism — not all economic activity, but capitalism in particular — is an fundamentally an unstable process that is continually upsetting its own order.

In 1942, Schumpeter published the book that gave us the term “creative destruction.” Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy became one of the twentieth century’s most seminal works of nonfiction. In the vision it lays out, shorter business cycles are nested within Kondratieff’s long waves. While many establishment economists had dismissed Kondratieff’s theory as mystical nonsense, Schumpeter could see the deep pattern too. For Schumpeter, Kondratieff had described something profound: the heartbeat of capitalism, driven not by invisible hands or rational actors but by the disruptive force of entrepreneurial ingenuity that periodically remade entire societies.

Schumpeter’s view of economics was Darwinian, seeing the market as a living, breathing organism that constantly adapts through bursts of technological revolution — inhale! — followed by periods of consolidation and eventual contraction — release. For Schumpeter, the fits and starts were a feature, not a bug. The waves proposed by Kondratieff followed an internal logic that linked them: each wave created the conditions for its own decline as technologies matured and investment opportunities became exhausted, creating a vacuum that begged to be filled by a new wave of innovation. This suggested capitalism had a kind of evolutionary metabolism, periodically shedding old industries to make room for new ones — an idea that was heretical to Soviet economic thinking but welcome in Schumpeter’s liberal America.

The metamorphosis of machines

Take the first wave, the start of which Kondratieff located around 1780 with the creation of James Watt’s steam engine and Edward Cartwright’s power loom. These combined technologies revolutionized the textile industry and birthed a new kind of manufacturing. Hitherto agricultural societies were flung one by one into the industrial age. As Britain’s cotton processing increased by orders of magnitude, people moved into cities and filled factories, upending medieval social structures that had held for centuries. But the factories of the time were mostly small, and the means of transportation — horse-drawn carriages and dirt roads — did not allow for goods to be efficiently transported over long distances. Once local demand for textile goods was saturated, a great recession unfolded, leaving millions unemployed and plunged into landless poverty.

The next wave of capitalism would need to find a way out of the rubble of the first. The key innovation Kondratieff identified for his second wave was the steel converter Henry Bessemer perfected in 1855. While steel was known in antiquity, Bessemer’s process allowed large quantities of steel to be produced cheaply. This affordability ushered in a range of new applications for the fortified alloy: crucially steel railways, but also steel ships, steel bridges, steel machines, even steel weapons. With this, the limits to growth that had drawn the first wave to a close were reinterpreted. Transportation was revolutionized by trains, setting off another boom of economic activity. The societies that rode the second wave enjoyed full employment and Victorian optimism. Factory workers gained power through unions and socialist parties, prompting capitalist concessions in the form of the first major social reforms of modernity and the first coming of welfare. Another wave had remade the world.

Economists have identified three more K-waves, as they are now known. The third wave was driven by the explosion of electrical and chemical industries, epitomized in the image of towns and cities lighting up at night or the gas masks in the trenches of the Great War. In the fourth wave, the invention of the automobile simultaneously created the urgency to build cars, build roads, and pump oil, giving rise to the most emblematic companies of the mid-twentieth century. The oil crisis of 1973 provided the epitaph for their dominance; something else was brewing in the bowels of Silicon Valley. Innovations such as the personal computer, the world wide web, and the smartphone would power the fifth wave, giving rise to the companies that would outstrip even the petroleum dinosaurs in power: Nvidia, Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon.

These are the masters of the current age of man.

The sixth wave

“K-waves are hardly part of the mainstream quiver of explanatory arrows,” the historian William Thompson once quipped. While his own work traced the long waves back to Song dynasty China, many doubt that they even exist. Even so, for those familiar with the literature on K-waves, trying to predict the next one can be hard to resist. Something there is that loves a pattern.

In the current atmosphere of almost hysterical excitement around machine learning, many have pointed to artificial intelligence as the obvious candidate for powering the sixth wave. But while artificial intelligence would represent an extension of the last wave, steered by information technology, we may need a wilder imagination to spot the next great paradigm of development. Supposing that the future will be an intensified version of the past is almost too easy. As Henry Ford is rumored to have said, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they’d have said faster horses.”

Leo Nefiodow proposed a different kind of wave. In 2014, the German consultant published an influential book that argued that while the development of information technology, robotics, and the internet would all inescapably form parts of the future economy, they lacked both the power to drive full employment and the longevity to support a full K-wave.

Instead, Nefiodow placed his gaze on what he called the entropic sector, the combined destructive power of violence, crime, environmental damage, military spending, burnout, and illness. Noting that environmental harm alone accounted for one tenth of the global gross national product, he calculated that if we could reduce the entropy in our economy by even 10%, that alone would free up $3 trillion year on year to power the human project. Today the potentials locked up in dysfunction are likely even greater.

Nefiodow envisioned a new wave of green energy, biotechnology, and enhanced health care — collectively, an industry of healing — overtaking the world economy. “The question is not whether a higher level of morality and thus also of order and health will prevail,” he wrote, “but rather which manifestations and countries will be the trailblazers and who will benefit the most from it.”

On some fundamental level, it only makes sense that the next locus of humanity’s productive focus should be healing, since five industrial waves have left our bodies, brains, and enveloping biosphere degraded. The atmosphere has been knocked off balance. Rivers the world over are dammed and poisoned. Soil, a resource that is both limited and essential, is being prodigally squandered. Our oceans have been trawled and overfished, and are set to now be mined. Acres of tropical old-growth forests are felled every day. Biodiversity, nature’s reserve of resourcefulness, the very toolbox from which she responds to shocks and change, is being reduced at a rate for which we have no historical or geological precedent. Zoonotic diseases threaten to overwhelm the pace of science’s progress as well as our capacity to contain outbreaks. Microplastics are ubiquitous, cropping up not only in watersheds but in all of our most delicate tissues, placentas, and brains. Industrially processed food and mechanical convenience have reduced the vitality of our bodies, while social media has reduced the capacity of our minds, such that we are losing the ability to direct our attention at will and raising the most anxious generation in history.

In short, we might say we are approaching the time in which Hesiod wrote that children would be “born with gray hair at their temples.” It has become almost a matter of survival — certainly of happiness — to find health.

And what is health?

A verdant affair

Modern Western medicine has traditionally regarded health as a property of the body: blood pressure, organ function, chemical balances, et cetera. But ecology reveals a more essential picture: health never belongs to any single individual but emerges from the dynamic exchanges between an organism and its surroundings. It cannot be confined to our skin, but rather extends outward into the ecosystems we inhabit. Our bodies themselves are already an ecosystem: trillions of microbes in our gut, skin, and lungs configure everything from our digestion to our capacity for joy. What we call “self” is really a consortium of species, an ongoing collaborative venture between the human figure and its bacterial denizens — an upright cyborg holobiont. The landscapes we inhabit, particularly the half of the habitable Earth we’ve conscripted for agriculture, might be better understood as our extended phenotypes, upon which evolution will render its selection.

Scientific literature bears out that loneliness, unfairness, and marginalization are as physiologically damaging as pathogens, while well-designed buildings, clean rivers, and social commons are a form of medicine.

We are not discrete biological machines, and so health is always relational and spatial. Failure to account for this goes toward explaining why the overall disease burden is growing even as investment in research and health care products escalates. The project of cultivating eudaimonia is not restricted to medicine and biotechnology; it is a vastly cross-disciplinary affair that recruits psychology, ecology, architecture, design, education and contemplative disciplines, and asks that they work together.

The business of wellbeing is evidently enormous — at least as big as the steam engine. But there is an embedded risk that even with this holistic view, markets will merely commodify health unless structural dysfunctions within capitalism are addressed. Under the current regime, money is made from illness, not health; prescription drugs are tremendously lucrative but also the third leading cause of death in wealthy nations. If we fail to rejig perverse incentives or correct socially maladaptive market ideologies, no amount of investment in health will bring us to health. In order to usher in an age of real healing, the sixth wave would need to provoke an evolution of capitalism itself.

An economic system can only be enduring to the extent that it aligns with nature’s own elementary patterns. It might be said that capitalism outlived the state-controlled Soviet economy because it more closely hews to the dynamics of nature, however marginally, which is why Schumpeter was able to observe quasi-metabolic processes in the market. For our economic life to continue, it will need to come into harmony with the presiding order that governs our planet; over a long enough arc, the Earth’s own pattern always prevails.

For Nefiodow, the patron saint of this integrative vision is Hildegard von Bingen, the medieval physician and polymath for whom health was always sourced, directly or indirectly, from the power of nature, a power that seeks balance. “In all creatures, animals, birds, fishes, herbs and fruit trees, mysterious healing powers lie hidden,” she wrote.

Hildegard was educated in a Benedictine monastery and steeped in Aristotle and Galen, but she was primarily animated by visions of “living light” that accompanied her all her life. Her work as a musician, theologian, and herbalist gave her a prismatic view of the cosmos and deep grounding as a physician. In Hildegard’s vision, disease was not a process but an absence of process. Her medical manuscript Physica recommends moderation, good diet, regular exertion, rest, a sympathetic community, and even an early form of psychotherapy. Hildegard saw the natural world and human beings as connected by what she called viriditas or “greening power” — a principle that elsewhere might be called the Tao.

The first four Kondratieff waves were charged by the transformation of energy: steam, electricity, oil. The fifth wave was charged by the transformation of external information flows: bits and data. The sixth wave of healing could be said to be charged by the transformation of internal information — a fundamental reordering of our understanding of ourselves and our relationship to everything else.

The ancients had a name for this binding agent that orders the cosmos. They called it Eros — love. “From an ecological perspective, love is a practice of balancing interests that leads to a state of greater aliveness,” writes the biologist Andreas Weber in Matter and Desire: An Erotic Ecology. “We can understand all processes in the biosphere as processes of relationship.”

The sixth wave, then, may be experienced as a wave of love — which for Hesiod was “the most beautiful among the gods.”