At the University of Oxford, we have been helping to build a vast database of world history capable of explaining why some civilizations grow and flourish – while others fall apart. One of the most remarkable findings is that when societies grow beyond around a million individuals – what we call the mega-society threshold – their survival often depends on developing new ways of pulling together to avoid being torn apart by the kind of polarization rooted in divisions of ethnicity, class, and religion.
Many large civilizations in the past that failed to find ways of enabling cooperation beyond that threshold came to a sticky end. Earlier this year, I went to meet some of Costa Rica’s most influential leaders who helped make the country an idyllic, peaceful exception in Latin America – the “Switzerland of Central America”, admired for its stable democracy, high literacy rates, abolished military, and buoyant economy.
I had lengthy conversations with former politicians, including Miguel Angel Rodriguez (President from 1998-2002), Ana Elena Chacon (vice-president form 2014-2018), as well as a variety of distinguished government ministers, business leaders and academics. We talked not only about their role in building the country we know today but also why things are starting to fall apart. And these conversations were interlaced with lessons from ancient history.
I soon learned from these conversations that Costa Rica passed the mega-society threshold around 1960 at a time when agricultural and cattle ranching intensification was seen as the future. Back then, being Costa Rican had less to do with being green and more to do with being peaceful, egalitarian, agrarian, and Catholic. But few were able to foresee the risks lurking just beneath the surface.
As the metropolitan region around San Jose grew, an urban-rural divide began to develop. Little by little, people realized they no longer knew their neighbours. Among other things, this meant that the reputational cost of not going to church decreased and society secularized. Schools that had once brought together children from different backgrounds became increasingly segregated and waves of immigration created ethnic divisions. Little by little, the number of people living in poverty increased, the rich became a lot richer, and the middle class shrank.
If there is one thing history tells us about societies that have passed the mega threshold, it is that there will always be new ways for old divisions to resurface. Way back in first millennium BCE, new ethical philosophies and moralizing religions appeared, enabling a succession of glorious civilizations to rise and spread from Egypt, the Levant, and Mesopotamia in the West and China and South Asia in the East.
The secret to their success had to do partly with the ways in which the Abrahamic traditions of Western Eurasia and karmic systems spreading from the East enabled people from very diverse backgrounds to cooperate based on shared identities, values, doctrines, and narratives. This kind of cooperation is not easy to achieve, even – in fact perhaps especially – today.
Some of the threats to cohesion in Costa Rica in the twenty-first century are familiar to many other democracies. A media industry providing click bait for ad agencies has created a frenzy of anxiety around narcoculture, gang violence, and drug cartels. Fears of mugging and home invasions have deepened divisions in society and anger at the state for failing to maintain law and order.
Social media has become central to daily life, with everybody’s heads buried in phones delivering bad news stories rather than engaging more positively with people around them. Bureaucracy has become increasingly bloated, slow, and inefficient, stoking further alienation towards the state. And as the political ideology of educated liberals has grown increasingly disconnected from the norms and values of ordinary people, the gap between the haves and have-nots has also become a battle ground for culture wars.
And then there was the pandemic. By 2020, Costa Rica had a large and growing population living in poverty who depended on their extended families and social networks for survival. Imagine the costs to such people of having to observe social distancing rules. Lockdowns were so unpopular that the ruling party became unelectable by the end of its term. And since the main opposition party was led by a controversial figure who had spent years abroad while under scrutiny in a corruption investigation, the way was open for a new kind of leader to sweep to power in 2022.
Populism around the world has astutely capitalized on disillusionment with the establishment and created new methods of communicating directly to the people. Since environmental policy is generally associated with leaders and institutions in which trust has been declining, continued support for green policies is no longer guaranteed. In Costa Rica, gas and oil reserves are now increasingly seen as potentially attractive options for future investment and Pentecostal churches backed by Texan oil money are now spreading fast, spreading climate change scepticism.
Does this spell disaster for the future of environmentalism in Costa Rica? In next week’s article, I team up with former Minister for the Environment and Energy Carlos Manuel Rodriguez, to explore the implications of this history for the fate of the country’s carbon footprint.
By Harvey Whitehouse
Author of Inheritance: The Evolutionary Origins of the Modern World
