Creative Destruction

Are God and Nature then at strife,

That Nature lends such evil dreams?

So careful of the type she seems,

So careless of the single life;...

A. Lord Tennyson, "In Memoriam" v. 55

"The origins of Europe were hammered out on the anvil of war."

 R. A. Brown, The Origins of Modern Europe

Shiva
Left Hand:  Fire-Destruction
Right Hand: Drum-Creation

Hinduism, the world's oldest religion, has many deities. One of the most interesting is Shiva whose task is demolishing the universe to prepare for its rebirth.  Like a slash and burn farmer, he sets fire to existing worlds to nourish new ones--a "no pain, no gain" kind of deity.  

            Joseph Schumpeter, a 20th century American economist, took a similar tack. He coined the term "creative destruction" to describe cycles wherein entrepreneurs continually slash and burn less useful processes and products.  Think, for example, what the Model T did to the buggy whip industry, or what calculators did to slide rules. Lots of people lost jobs, but lots gained them.  The King is dead; long live the King.    

"Creative destruction" thus has an ancient and venerable pedigree. But it also has disturbing implications, and some are not so obvious.  Writ large, creative destruction has biological and political aspects that demand another look at just what it means to be human.  

Aztec Smallpox Victims, 16th cent.

First, the biological aspects.  Historians of disease like William McNeill have cataloged the consequences of epidemics in world history, chief among which was the creation of separate "disease pools" in different world regions.  Continual exposure to diseases that were specific to one pool allowed its survivors to prevail over populations in other pools.  For example, European diseases like smallpox wiped out 90% of the Aztecs and Incas in the century following Columbus's arrival in the Americas.  But…this is a very big "but"…the price of such immunological prowess was colossal: millennia of suffering and innumerable deaths from illnesses like smallpox, influenza, measles and tuberculosis.  

And consider the political implications.  Historians note that the strength of states in western Europe and North America, those whose democratic heritage we celebrate today, derives from their exposure to, and victory in, civil and interstate wars. For example, the havoc wrought by the Napoleonic wars prompted the victors to enforce the agreements of the Congress of Vienna in 1815, affirming the legitimacy of Europe's "enlightened" monarchs and immunizing them against the contagion of revolutionary violence.  These wars left the victors with stronger immune systems in the form of greater national unity and more powerful taxation and military structures.  Sociologist Charles Tilley put it this way:  "War makes states."  

Europe 1914

            Europe's political success was, of course, partial and temporary.  Post-1815, it remained free of major wars for nearly a century.  Yet revolutionary nationalism, like a virus on steroids, had its day, beginning with uprisings in 1830 and 1848.  Then from 1914-1945 alone, the continent clocked 60-80 million deaths.  And consider how often war changed Europe's borders from 1914 to now: countries just came and went.  

Europe 2005

            In contrast, look at sub-Saharan Africa where decrepit states like Congo, Chad, Zimbabwe, and Somalia persist, if only by grace of UN membership or big power patrons.  Borders, drawn by Europeans for European purposes, contain a hodgepodge of sectarian elements.  Yet states here have undergone almost no boundary changes since the 1960s (Eritrea and South Sudan are exceptions), and in reality since the imposition of colonial rule.  A similar case could be made for the Middle East after World War I.  The cost of statehood that is born in such a sterile context is an endemic civil mayhem analogous to the epidemics that ravaged Europe and the Americas.    

             Biological pathogens, like their political cousins, also had their day.  Influenza killed 40-50 million people in 1918; the 1980's AIDS pandemic stunned a medical establishment that had, just a few years before, announced the end of infectious diseases.  Today's antibiotic-resistant diseases like tuberculosis, MRSA, and SARS pop up and down like microbial terrorists. 

Africa, Colonial and Current Boundaries

So whatever the battlefield--microbial, economic, demographic, international--destruction engenders creation, and vice versa.  The elements in this dynamic are as inseparable as space and time: two sides of the same coin, yet tough to understand, tougher to reconcile.

The implications of all this are unsettling. We are beneficiaries of biological and political insults that created inconceivable misery over innumerable years for countless forbearers. And like them, we are fodder for the disease- and war-experienced evolution of our descendants.  This is a most unedifying take on our place in the universe.

            Tennyson's verse above reminds us that the sacredness of the individual, a principal pillar of western civilization, seems trumped by the good of the group in this process.  Death and rebirth narratives may give comfort in the present.  Yet human suffering appears to be a precondition for strengthening the bodies and bodies politic of groups who will come later--much, much later.  

            Perhaps we will find some alternative to war and disease as preconditions for creation.  For now though, however unpalatable, creative destruction remains an unsettling feature of our identity.  Shiva and Schumpeter were on to something here.