Nicholas Wade's Darwinian Liberal Conservatism

In 1975, the left-wing critics of Ed Wilson's Sociobiology accused him of promoting a genetic determinism and a conservative (or even neo-Nazi) politics that denied the possibility and desirability of the social change through cultural learning that could establish a socialist society.  Nicholas Wade, writing for the journal Science, responded by pointing out that Wilson could not be a strict genetic determinist because he recognized that human social behavior was largely shaped by cultural learning.  The evolution of social behavior works through the interaction of genes and culture, so that genetic evolution both enables and constrains cultural evolution.  

Wade also dismissed the charge that Wilson was supporting Nazi-like eugenics as unfairly inflammatory political rhetoric.  After all, Wade noted, Wilson "describes himself as a liberal."  Wilson himself had said that human sociobiology could explain the human resistance to oppressive despotism as an expression of those human rights that are rooted in human biological nature--"rights that are innate, rooted in the ineradicable drives for survival and self-esteem."  So it seemed that if Wilson's sociobiology promoted conservatism, it must be a liberal conservatism--conservative in the sense of conserving those genetically evolved behaviors and traditions that have worked in the past, but liberal in the sense of being open to the cultural evolution of the liberal institutions that secure human liberty.

In his new book The Origin of Politics: How Evolution and Ideology Shape the Fate of Nations, Wade elaborates both of these themes--the gene-culture coevolution of human social behavior and the need for both liberal and conservative attitudes to sustain a free, flourishing, and enduring social order.  He also adds a third theme--the evolution of the modern nation-state--that supports an illiberal nationalism that seems to contradict his liberal conservatism.

THE GENE-CULTURE COEVOLUTION OF POLITICS

Many of the leftist critics of sociobiology worried that any conception of a genetic human nature as a constraint on cultural change would deny the possibility of creating a socialist society.  Wade confirms that fear by arguing that the history of socialis utopias--particularly, the socialist kibbutzim in Israel-- shows that any attempt to conquer human nature in establishing socialism must ultimately fail.

The kibbutzim were collective farms established in Israel in the early 20th century.  To achieve complete equality, they abolished the family, abolished the traditional division of labor between men and women, abolished private property, and abolished differential compensation for workers.

The kibbutzim practiced a pure socialism that came as close to absolute equality as any human community has ever achieved.  The members rotated jobs.  They took all of their meals in a common dining hall.  They had no private property.  They did not even own the clothing they wore, which was provided for them by the community.  When children were born, they were sent to a children's house to be cared for and educated by the community.  Children were allowed to visit their parents only a few hours in the afternoon.  This was understood as necessary for the sexual equality of men and women, because women were free from the burden of caring for their children. All decisions about the organization of the community were made by consensus in a general assembly, usually held weekly, where every member participated equally.  The kibbutzniks saw themselves as putting into practice the Marxist principle of "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need."  They also seemed to be following Plato's recommendation in The Republic that the Guardians in the just city should not have private property or private families, because they should care for the common good of the whole community rather than their selfish private interests.

But then, beginning in the 1950s and 1960s, young mothers began to complain that they did not have enough time with their children.  They wanted at least to be able to put their children to sleep at night.  As the children matured to adulthood, many of them left the kibbutz because they didn't like the communal childrearing.  Beginning in the 1970s, many of the kibbutzim decided to allow family sleeping rather than collective sleeping.  Socialists complained that allowing children to live with their parents would lead to the privatization of other things and inequality.

The kibbutzniks wanted not only private families but also private property.  Some of them returning from serving in the British army in World War Two came back with teakettles.  Allowing some people to own private teakettles, and to drink tea privately in their homes rather than in the communal dining room, violated socialist equality.  Then some people wanted to own their own clothes and to select their clothing.  They also wanted to own their homes.

The kibbutzim had to abandon job rotation to keep skilled people in their specialized jobs.  The most skilled workers wanted extra pay for their work, and they complained about those people who didn't work hard but received equal pay.  By the end of the 1990s, many kibbutzim were assigning wages according to skill level.

So socialism was successful for the founding generation of the kibbutzniks because of their ideological commitment to the project.  But it ultimately failed because the second and third generations rejected it as frustrating their natural human desires for familial bonding, private property, and earnings according to merit.  The socialist culture of the kibbutzim failed to abolish evolved human nature.

But even if cultural learning cannot abolish human nature, Wade observes, human nature is flexible enough that it can be bent in certain directions by cultural learning.  His two examples of this happening are the rise of monogamy and the fall of tribalism in human history.

Although monogamous pair-bonding is deeply rooted in human evolutionary history, there is also an evolutionary logic for men to compete with one another for sexual access to many women.  Since women can bear only a few children in their lifetimes, but men can father many, a man who mates with many women increases his Darwinian fitness.  But only men with power, status, and wealth can provide multiple women with the resources they need for bearing and rearing children.  So it was only after the development of agriculture, which allowed a few men to accumulate great wealth and power, that high status men were able to have many wives.  For example, Wade notes that the Moroccan ruler Moulay Ismail was reputed to have had over 500 concubines and to have fathered over 1,000 children by the time of his death in 1727.  Since the emergence of agriculture, most societies have allowed polygamy.  Actually, this means polygyny (multiple women mated with one man), because polyandry (multiple men mated with one woman) is extremely rare.

But then in ancient Greece and Rome, there arose a cultural rule forbidding anyone from marrying more than one person at a time.  The Christian Church then strictly enforced this cultural rule of monogamy across the Roman Empire and then across the European states.

Rich men are worse off from this cultural rule because it limits their male desire to leave as many (legitimate) offspring as possible.  But it benefits poor men in a way that benefits society at large.

In a polygamous society, the highest status men will have many wives.  Some middle status men will have one wife each.  Consequently, the lowest status men will have little chance of finding a wife.  These young wifeless men will become resentful and violent and thus disruptive to the social order.  

Monogamy evenly distributes the women as mates for the men, and then every man has a stake in the existing order, which strengthens social cohesion.  For that reason, monogamous societies will tend to be more stable and enduring than polygamous societies.

This cultural evolution of monogamy illustrates how a cultural rule can bend but not break a natural human propensity.  In a monogamous society, rich and powerful men (such as politicians) will enjoy sexual access to many women, but these adulterous affairs will not be socially or legally legitimized.

Another example of a cultural curbing of a natural propensity that was necessary for the emergence of modern state societies is the repression of tribalism.  With the appearance of the first horticulturalists about 10,000 years ago--small-scale cultivators of plants--people lived in small villages organized into clans and tribes.  A clan is a social group consisting of families who claim a common ancestor.  The informal leadership of a clan is usually elders or a chief.  A tribe is composed of multiple clans claiming common ancestry and shared culture, language, territory, and traditions.  The tribe is governed by chiefs or councils, but they have nothing like a formal government or bureaucratic state.  John Locke understood the American Indian tribes (particularly, the Huron tribes described by Gabriel Sagard) as living in the state of nature with informal governance but no formal political institutions.

For thousands of years, tribalism was the predominant social organization for most human beings around the world.  History's largest land empire--the Mongol Empire--was tribally organized, and by 1279 AD it stretched from the Pacific Ocean to Eastern Europe.

In Europe, Wade observes, tribalism was undermined by the Catholic Church.  Tribes depend on a network of marriages between people who are closely related to preserve male lineages and inheritance of property in the male line.  Because of the short life spans in premodern times, families often had no male heir.  To keep wealth within the family or tribe, men were required to marry their brother's widow, or a widowed man was required to marry his sister-in-law.  Or a family could resort to adoption.  The Church used its power over marriage rules to forbid these practices under the pretext of preventing incest.  Then, when people on their deathbeds had no male descendants, they could be persuaded by a priest to give their property to the Church as a way of assuring their heavenly salvation.  Consequently, so much of the wealth of the tribes was transferred to the Church that tribal structures were dissolved.

Wade argues that what we see here is the coevolution of genetic instincts and cultural traditions, so that cultural norms can curb genetic instincts like polygamy and tribalism, but those instincts can never be totally extinguished.  Rich and powerful men will always be tempted by the polygamous instinct for extramarital sex.  And people will always have a tribalistic instinct to favor their relatives.

THE EVOLUTION OF LIBERAL CONSERVATISM

The cultural suppression of polygamy and tribalism, allowed for the emergence of the monogamous nuclear family in Europe as the normative institution for organizing marriage and kinship.  The monogamous nuclear family—a couple and their dependent children living together—has historically been linked to the rise of individualism in Western societies. This arises from its role in shaping personal identity, property rights, and social roles.

But people were still under the authoritarian religious and political authority of the ruling elites who controlled the church and the state.  Securing the social, economic, and political freedoms enjoyed by people in a modern liberal democracy, Wade explains, required the cultural evolution of the liberal constitutionalism that first emerged fully in England in the Glorious Revolution of 1688.

The Stuart monarchs claimed to rule by divine right, and thus they could not be under the law, since the King was the Law--Rex Lex.  Their opponents in Parliament argued that the king must be subject to the law.  By the late 17th century, there were two political factions in this debate.  The Tories defended the divine right authority of the King.  The Whigs argued for parliamentary supremacy and the rule of law over the King.  This debate was settled when the last of the Stuarts, James II, was forced into exile and replaced in 1689 by William III of the Dutch House of Orange.  This established that the king was subject to the law and Parliament and that governments could rule only with the consent of the people.  Most Tories then accepted constitutional monarchy and gave up the idea of divine-right monarchy.

Wade sees here the cultural evolution of the three components of the modern liberal democratic order.

First, the state was strong enough to defend itself and prevent unrest within its borders.  Second, such conditions allowed the emergence of the rule of law and respect for property rights.  Third, because of the existence and legitimacy of the law, Parliament was able to challenge the king's absolute power and make him subject to the will of elected government (94-95).

For Wade, this allowed for "institutions such as property rights, free markets, and an unbiased legal system . . . open and impersonal institutions, or 'inclusive institutions'" that "stand in contrast to 'extractive institutions' that are designed to sequester a society's resources for the benefit of a small elite" (98-99).  This cultural evolution from "extractive institutions" to "inclusive institutions" corresponds to what Stephen Balch would call the move from a Takers regime to a Makers regime (Naturalizing History: A Biocultural Theory of Human Progress [Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2026).  The Makers are those who produce wealth.  The Takers are those who expropriate the wealth produced by others.

David Hume saw the conflict between the Tories as the party of authority and obedience to rulers and the Whigs as the party of liberty and resistance to tyranny as a political battle in which the partisans of each faction refused to see the partial truth in each side: good government requires a tense balance between authority and liberty, so that each side moderates the other.  Extreme authoritarianism creates tyranny.  Extreme libertarianism creates anarchy.  Hume thought the task of a philosopher is not to become a partisan for one side over the other but to mediate between the two extremes and promote compromise and accommodation.

Although Wade is not completely clear on this point, he seems to agree with Hume in suggesting that the genetic and cultural evolution of political order requires a balance or accommodation between conservative political attitudes (expressed by the Tories) and liberal political attitudes (expressed by the Whigs), which I have called "liberal conservatism."  

Wade agrees with those political scientists--John Hibbing, Peter Hatemi, and their colleagues--who argue that twin studies have shown that political attitudes are to a significant degree genetically influenced (see John R. Hibbing, Kevin B. Smith, and John R. Alford, Predisposed: The Left, The Right, and the Biology of Political Differences, second edition [New York: Routledge, 2024].  In some studies, questionnaires are given to identical twins, who have 100% of their genome in common, and to fraternal twins, who share on average 50% of their genes.  When the responses from the identical twin pairs are more similar than those from the fraternal twin pairs, a genetic influence can be inferred.  The twins can be asked to answer yes or no to a series of questions about political issues such as the death penalty, gay rights, immigration, and abortion.  In one study, researchers constructed an index of conservatism based on typically conservative answers to the questions and then estimated the heritability of conservatism--the extent to which the variability in the population is influenced by genetics--as 43%.  Studies of identical twins reared apart show that if you know that one of the twins is politically conservative, you can predict that the other twin is likely to be politically conservative.  So it seems that there is some genetic influence on whether one is politically conservative or liberal.

In some previous posts, I have criticized this "genopolitics" research of Hibbing and his colleagues.  One of my main criticisms has been that Hibbing's group gives us an implausibly simplistic model that cannot account for the complex diversity of evolved political ideology.  Isn't it hard to see how the complexity of political thought and behavior could be reduced to two categories at opposite ends of one dimension--the political left or the political right--or perhaps three categories if we include the political center?  At the very least, we need to recognize libertarianism or classical liberalism as a position that is neither purely liberal nor purely conservative, a position that is ignored by Hibbing's group.

The insistence of Hibbing's group that everyone is either liberal or conservative, left or right, requires that everyone be forced to make dichotomous choices about the "bedrock issues of social organization."  They have done this by using a "Society Works Best Instrument" (Kevin Smith et al., "Linking Genetics and Political Attitudes: Reconceptualizing Political Ideology," Political Psychology 32 [2011]: 390-91).  People are given a series of 14 binary choices about how "Society works best when . . ."  Amazingly, they ask about how "society" works best, but they ask nothing about "government" or "the state"; and so they make it impossible to distinguish between the natural and voluntary associations in civil society and the coercive power of government.

Here are some examples.  "Society works best when . . . 1. Those who break the rules are punished. 2. Those who break the rules are forgiven.  1. Every member contributes. 2. More fortunate members sacrifice to help others.  1. People are rewarded according to merit.  2. People are rewarded according to need.  1. People take primary responsibility for their welfare. 2. People join together to help others.  1. People are proud they belong to the best society there is.  2. People realize that no society is better than any other."

Every choice of a 1 was given a score of 1, and every choice of a 2 was given a score of -1.  Those whose total score was close to 14 were extreme conservatives.  Those whose total score was close to -14 were extreme liberals.

I assure you I am not making this up.  This is what Hibbing and his group regard as real social science. 

Wouldn't any reasonable person--any liberal or conservative--object that most of these dichotomous choices are ridiculous, because they are false dichotomies?  Would the conservative say that those who break the rules should always be punished and never forgiven?  Or would the liberal say that they should always be forgiven and never punished?  Would the conservative say that people should always be rewarded according to merit and never according to need?  Or would the liberal say that people should always be rewarded according to need and never according to merit?  Would the conservative say that people should always take primary responsibility for their welfare and never help others?  Or would the liberal say that people should always help others and never take primary responsibility for their own welfare?  Surely, the answer to all these questions is no.

If you insist that political ideology consists of a choice between only two alternatives, these are the kind of silly choices that you have to give to people.

Perhaps we need a somewhat wider range of choices.  Hibbing et al. are silent about the proposal by some political scientists--such as William Maddox and Stuart Lilie (in Beyond Liberal and Conservative: Reassessing the Political Spectrum [Cato Institute, 1984])--for using the two dimensions of freedom--economic freedom and personal freedom--to construct a matrix of four or five political ideologies.  American public opinion survey data shows, they contend, that American citizens are not just divided into liberals and conservatives, but also into libertarians and populists.  Some libertarian theorists (such as David Boaz), as well as the Libertarian Party, have adopted this analysis to construct a matrix of political ideologies based on two dimensions--personal liberty and economic liberty:

You can take a short quiz to see where you belong.  If you score high on personal liberty but low on economic liberty, you're a liberal.  If you score low on personal liberty but high on economic liberty, you're a conservative. If you score low on both personal liberty and economic liberty, you're a statist (or an authoritarian).  (Maddox and Lilie would call you a populist.)   If you score high on both personal liberty and economic liberty, you're a libertarian.  If you score towards the middle on both scales, you're a centrist.

Since the libertarian (or classical liberal) agrees with the liberal about the importance of personal liberty and agrees with the conservative about the importance of economic liberty, the libertarian could also be called a liberal conservative.

Wade never explicitly affirms what I am calling "liberal conservatism," but it's implied in much of what he says.  "Evolution has embedded four major structural elements of society in the human genome," Wade claims.  "These are the family, the specialized roles of the two sexes, social institutions [such as religion, commerce, and politics], and the tribe with its successor institution the nation-state" (60, 205).  Wade argues that while conservatives firmly support those evolutionary pillars of social order, liberals--or at least those belonging to the "ultra-left"--undermine those pillars.  But then he insists: "The evolutionary perspective provides no basis for favoring conservative over liberal politics" (211).  On the contrary, "a healthy society needs to maintain in its genetic patrimony the full range of political behavior," combining "its liberal-promoting alleles" and its "conservative alleles," because a healthy society needs to be conservative in preserving its traditional norms but also liberal in making changes in response to a changing environment (158).

Wade seems to be agreeing with Hume that a healthy social order requires a balancing of the Tory party of authority and the Whig party of liberty as expressing two sides of the human nature of social order.  But as I have already suggested, a better position would be to affirm a Darwinian liberal conservatism that recognizes both liberty and authority as grounded in our evolved human nature.

I will say more about this in my next post.

The Darwinian Lockean Liberalism of Goldstein's Mattering Instinct

 

                                               "What's It All About?" Cartoon by Patrick Hardin

The General Diagram for Eric Chaisson's Course on "Cosmic Evolution," Available at His Website.

The Darwinian Lockean Liberalism that I have defended on this blog supports Goldstein's theory of the mattering instinct in four ways.  

The Darwinian evolution of life explains life's self-mattering as resistance to entropy.  Lockean evolutionary psychology explains the human mattering instinct as rooted in self-ownership and religious enthusiasm.  The Lockean evolutionary psychology of morality explains the multiplicity of mattering projects as different rankings of the twenty natural desires of our evolved human nature.  Finally, Darwinian Lockean Liberalism explains how we can rightly condemn some mattering projects as immoral when they assume that mattering is a zero-sum game in which there is not enough mattering to go around.

LIFE'S SELF-MATTERING AS RESISTANCE TO ENTROPY

Patrick Hardin's cartoon shows the biological evolution of complex systems (from the less to the more complex) among vertebrate forms of life--from fish to primates to humans.  Eric Chaisson's diagram shows the cosmic evolution of complex systems from shortly after the Big Bang to the present, which includes purely physical systems as well as biological and cultural systems.  The common underlying theme is the ascent from simple disorder to complex order, or rising complexity.

That ascent to ever more complex order might seem to violate one of the fundamental laws of physics--the Second Law of Thermodynamics--which is the principle that in any natural process, the entropy (the disorder) of the Universe increases, so that energy naturally flows from hotter to colder systems, and not the reverse.  So, for example, a pot of hot soup will tend to cool off over time until it has the same temperature as the surrounding environment; and it will not spontaneously reheat itself.  Similarly, a house of cards will tend to collapse with time; and we can't expect a random collection of playing cards to assemble itself spontaneously into some ordered structure.

But this is true only for "closed systems" in which there is no flow of energy from outside the system.  In "open systems," a flow of energy from outside the system can create and maintain order in the system, and thus resist the tendency to entropy.  You can heat up the pot of soup on a stove.  And you can build a house of cards.  In both cases, you are introducing energy from outside the system to counter the tendency to entropy.  In the one case, you are turning up the gas or electrical heat from the stove.  In the other case, you are exerting your energy in building the house of cards.

The same is true for creating and maintaining the complex order of any system against the tendency to disorder--there must be a flow of energy from outside the system that sustains the order of the system.  And so life on Earth depends on capturing energy (mostly from the Sun through photosynthesis) that can be put to work in sustaining the complex systems of life and resisting entropy.  Animals capture the energy of sunlight through eating and digesting food, and through respiration, animals employ oxygen to release the energy in carbohydrates.  But while being alive is to be in resistance to entropy, eventually entropy wins, and everything that lives must die.

This explains why some evolutionary psychologists have said that "the Second Law of Thermodynamics Is the First Law of Psychology" (Tooby, Cosmides, and Barrett 2003).  Darwinian natural selection is the only known counterweight to the tendency of physical systems to the entropic loss of functional organization.  Organisms with anti-entropic mechanisms that sustain functional organization are more likely to survive and reproduce than organisms that fail to resist entropy.  

For organisms with brains, natural selection will favor psychological mechanisms that resist entropy.  As indicated in Hardin's cartoon, all vertebrates will have psychic mechanisms that incline them to "eat, survive, reproduce"--or better stated, each animal will prioritize its own eating, surviving, and reproducing, which is what Goldstein identifies as the organic message of self-mattering--every organism acts as if its own existence in this world, its persistence and flourishing, matters.  In organisms with brains, with some capacity for mental attention, this self-mattering drives them to acquire information about their environment and to seek out sources of free energy needed to resist entropy, while also avoiding threats to their existence that might hasten their death.

Chaisson's "Epic of Evolution" shows how the Second Law of Thermodynamics Is Also the First Law of Cosmic Evolution.  The ascent of the Cosmos over almost 14 billion years through eight epochs--the Particulate, the Galactic, the Stellar, the Planetary, the Chemical, the Biological, the Cultural, and the Future--moves from simpler systems to more complex systems.  At each level of complexity, these systems require a flow of energy available to work to sustain their complex order against the thermodynamic tendency to disorder.

Chaisson argues that this correlation between energy and complexity allows us to use "energy rate density" as the universal metric of complexity for all complex systems--from physical systems to biological systems to cultural systems.  Energy rate density is defined as "the amount of energy passing through a given system per unit time per unit mass" (Chaisson 2006:293).  This can be quantified as the number of ergs per second per gram (erg/s/g).  

By this measure, human beings are more complex than stars like the Sun because the energy rate density for a human being is much higher than for the Sun.  And within human beings, their brains are one of the most complex systems in the Universe.  Although our brain occupies only about two percent of our body's mass, our brain uses almost twenty percent of our body's total energy intake because of the high metabolism required to maintain the electrical activity of about 86 billion neurons with about 100 trillion synaptic connections (Chaisson 2006:295).

Although Goldstein does not cite Chaisson's work, she agrees with his central idea about energy rate density as the metric of complexity: "All life, all flourishing, depends on capturing energy (from sunlight or food) and applying it in local anti-entropic resistance.  And the more complicated the system, then the more ways for it to be disordered, and hence the more resistance required.  Again, our brains are the most complicated objects yet discovered in the universe and, not coincidentally, require a lot of energy" (57).

THE HUMAN MATTERING INSTINCT AS ROOTED IN SELF-OWNERSHIP OR DIVINE OWNERSHIP

The unique complexity of the human brain has created an emergent difference in kind from other animal brains, such that human beings are unique in their mattering instinct.  Every animal is driven by an organic mandate that ensures it matters to itself--that it pays attention to itself and to what it needs to do to secure its survival and flourishing.  But we human beings are the only animals for whom it is not sufficient that we subjectively feel that we matter to ourselves, because we must persuade ourselves that we truly objectively deserve to matter.

In persuading ourselves that we truly matter, we must appeal to one of two kinds of the mattering instinct of our evolutionary psychology--one grounded in divine ownership and the other grounded in self-ownership.  The natural human experience of religious transcendence--of being possessed by religious enthusiasm--can persuade us that we belong to God because He created us to serve His purposes, and therefore we matter because we matter to God.  In that case, we are transcenders on Goldstein's Mattering Map.

Or the natural human experience of self-ownership can persuade us that since we naturally own ourselves--our bodies and our minds--we are naturally free to pursue whatever conception of happiness or human flourishing that is best suited to our individual temperament, circumstances, and talents, and therefore our life matters because we are striving for some kind of moral or intellectual excellence in our life.  In that case, we are either socializers, heroic strivers, or competitors on the Mattering Map. 

 

In his Second Treatise, Locke seems to support the transcenders by grounding his law of nature in the "workmanship" of God in creating human beings:

The State of Nature has a Law of Nature to govern it, which obliges every one: And Reason, which is that Law, teaches al Mankind, who will be consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his Life, Health, Liberty, or Possessions. For Men being all the Workmanship of one Omnipotent, and infinitely wise Maker; All the Servants of one Sovereign Master, sent into the World by his order and about his business, they are his Property, whose Workmanship they are, made to last during his, not one another's Pleasure. And being furnished with like Faculties, sharing all in one Community of Nature, there cannot be supposed any such Subordination among us, that may Authorize us to destroy one another, as if we were made for one another's uses, as the inferior ranks of Creatures are for ours (para. 6).

Locke believed that the workmanship argument would require a rational theology that could prove the existence of God.  From “the idea of ourselves as understanding, rational creatures,” we would have to infer “the idea of a supreme Being, infinite in power, goodness, and wisdom, whose workmanship we are."  Through an anthropomorphic analogy, we could project from the idea of our own minds and other human minds the idea of a Divine Mind.  Thus, man would create God in man’s image.  But then Locke admitted that having the idea of God in one’s mind does not prove God’s real existence (ECHU, IV.3.18; IV.3.27; IV.10.1; IV.10.7; IV.10.19; IV.11.1).

Similarly, some evolutionary psychologists—such as Justin Barrett and Jesse Bering--have argued that the natural evolution of religious belief is rooted in the propensity of the human mind to detect rational agency in humans and other animals and then to infer a supernatural intelligent agency analogous to that of human minds.  But this anthropomorphic analogy between human and divine minds is dubious, and even if this explained the natural evolution of the idea of God in the human mind, that would not prove the existence of God.

This led Locke to conclude that believing in the existence of God is ultimately not a matter of reason but of faith.  And since “faith is not knowledge,” we cannot know what the true religion is (Locke, 1870, pp. 94-96; 1997, pp. 248-50; ECHU, IV.17-18). 

Since he doubted that reason could prove God’s existence in support of the workmanship argument, Locke developed the self-ownership argument that would provide a purely natural ground for his law of nature.  He wanted to appeal to a rational theology of divine workmanship, but if that failed, he could fall back onto his natural self-ownership argument.  These two tracks—God and nature--are suggested by Locke’s repeated appeals to “the Laws of God and Nature” (FT, 56, 124; ST, 60, 66, 90, 93, 142, 195).  The “fixed and permanent rule of morals” could be “firmly rooted in the soil of human nature,” and human nature could be understood as created by “nature or God” (1997, p. 125).  Notice that the creative source of human nature is nature or God.

Locke affirms individual self-ownership in his chapter on property in the Second Treatise:

Though the Earth, and all inferior Creatures be common to all Men, yet every Man has a Property in his own Person. This no Body has any Right to but himself. The Labour of his Body, and the Work of his Hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the State that Nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his Labour with, and joyned to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his Property. (para. 27)

From all which it is evident, that though the things of Nature are given in common, yet Man (by being Master of himself), and Proprietor of his own Person, and the Actions or Labour of it) had still in himself the great foundation of Property. (para. 44)

Here the foundation of Locke's political philosophy of natural rights is not God's ownership of the world and His rule by natural law, but rather the idea that human beings have natural rights because they are self-owners. Moreover, it is this natural autonomy of human beings, rather than their natural subordination to God, that informs the modern understanding of human rights.

Evolutionary science can show that the evolved psychology of ownership is rooted in self-ownership.  The human brain has an evolved interoceptive sense of owning the body that supports self-ownership and the ownership of external things as extensions of the self-owning self.  In this way, evolutionary neuroscience supports a Lockean liberal conception of equal natural rights rooted in natural self-ownership.  We can see how this sense of each person’s self-ownership arises in the evolved neuroanatomy of the brain to serve the survival and well-being of the human animal.  We can understand this as expressing interoception—the neural perception of the state of the body.

HUMAN FREEDOM AFFIRMS THE MULTIPLICITY OF MATTERING PROJECTS

In the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke says that in all of their actions, all human beings are moved to satisfy their natural human desires, and while there are many natural desires--I have identified twenty--they are all part of the human pursuit of happiness.  Human beings differ, however, in how they rank the natural desires.  For example, some human beings rank the natural desire for religious transcendence above all, while others rank the natural desire for intellectual understanding as the greatest pleasure.  So while there is no single summum bonum or highest good for all people, there is a single summum bonum for each person, and the pursuit of that highest good will be that person's mattering project (ECHU, 2.21.31-73).

If every human being is free to pursue his summum bonum, then every person's life matters.  The Lockean liberal regimes promote that freedom.  Countries that rank high on the "Human Freedom Index" tend to be countries that secure the widest pursuit of happiness and the multiplicity of mattering projects.  That is confirmed by the patterns of immigration: generally, people want to leave the less free societies and immigrate to the free societies.  Human beings vote with their feet for freedom.

HUMAN FREEDOM DENIES THE ZERO-SUM MATTERING PROJECTS

And yet a free society cannot tolerate all mattering projects.  It cannot tolerate those immoral mattering projects in which one person's sense of mattering comes from denying the mattering of others.  For example, when Frank Meeink was seventeen-year-old neo-Nazi skinhead, he was sent to prison for three years for kidnapping and torturing a teenage boy whom he believed to be a SHARP (a Skinhead Against Racial Prejudice), and thus a traitor to the neo-Nazi movement.  Meeink's mistake was in thinking that mattering is a zero-sum game in which one person's gain is another person's loss because there isn't enough mattering to go around.

On the contrary, the fundamental moral principle in a Lockean liberal social order is that all lives matter because there really is enough mattering to go around, as Goldstein argues (271-292).  Locke conveyed this thought in Some Thoughts Concerning Education when he advised parents about the importance of instilling the virtue of "civility" in their children, so that they would show "general good will and regard for all people," knowing that we are "not to think meanly of ourselves and not to think meanly of others" (secs. 141, 143).

REFERENCES

Chaisson, Eric. 2006. Epic of Evolution: Seven Ages of the Cosmos. New York: Columbia University Press.

Locke, John. 1870. Four Letters on Toleration. London: Ward, Lock, and Tyler.

Locke, John. 1997. Political Essays. Ed. Mark Goldie. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Tooby, John, Leda Cosmides, and H. Clark Barrett. 2003. "The Second Law of Thermodynamics is the First Law of Psychology." Psychological Bulletin 129:858-865.

Human Freedom Makes "A World Safe for 'Making'"

For the distinction between making and taking, see the previous post.

PERSONAL FREEDOM AS THE NATURAL GROUND OF ECONOMIC FREEDOM

Stephen Balch has identified the “anti-taking” ideologies as “classical liberal or libertarian” (2014, 16n.16).  He has also spoken of “pro-maker rights theories, such as those of John Locke” (315).  In passages like the following, he certainly seems to be endorsing classical liberalism or libertarianism as the moral argument of his book:

At the great anomaly’s heart lies the diminution of the part force plays in the distribution of status and goods.  That signal "achievement"—if it can be called such, a lot turned on luck—gave birth to a ‘World-Safe-for-Making (the underlying meaning of bourgeois constitutionalism, wherein, through a variety of normative and institutional practices, coercive power was contained in scope, increased in predictability, policed against private abuse, and when publicly employed, generally to serve, not subvert, industrious behavior.  Spared senseless exactions and arbitrary demands, science, invention, manufacture, commerce and banking gradually became career paths of choice for society’s best and brightest.  Because of this, when further powered by science, the World-Safe-for-Making (WSM) sparked a tremendous explosion of productive behavior and consumable wealth, the second ‘Cambrian’ (after agriculture) of human history.  Unquestionably a major metaevolutionary turn due to a new keystone (311).

When he speaks about “the diminution of the part force plays in the distribution of status and goods,” I’m reminded of James Payne’s History of Force, which makes the Lockean libertarian argument that declining violence means increasing liberty, and that the only justified use of force is as the reactive forcible punishment of those who initiate force.

When he speaks of the Western bourgeoisie as the makers, this evokes Deirdre McCloskey’s argument for liberalism as the celebration of the “bourgeois virtues.”

But then I wonder why Balch is not more vigorous in affirming the classical liberalism or libertarianism of WSM.  The answer seems to be that while he can give WSM one or two cheers, he can’t give it three cheers because of its “critical weakness” in failing to separate “property rights” from “personal rights.”  He explains this failure as arising from John Locke’s assertion of “property rights as an outgrowth of personal rights” (320).  He cites paragraph 6 of the Second Treatise, where Locke explains the law of nature as a no-harm principle rooted in the equal liberty of human beings: “that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his Life, Health, Liberty, or Possessions.”  He also could have cited paragraph 27, where Locke grounds property ownership in self-ownership: “Though the Earth, and all inferior Creatures be common to all Men, yet every Man has a Property in his own Person.  This no Body has any Right to but himself.  The Labour of his Body, and the Work of his Hands, we may say, are properly his.”  A man makes something his property by mixing his labor with it.  Elsewhere Locke identifies “labor” as “human industry,” which suggests that what he calls “labor” is what we today would call “human capital.”  

I have argued that Locke’s rooting of ownership in self-ownership is confirmed by the evolutionary neuroscience of interoception—the neural self-ownership of the body.

The “critical weakness” here, Balch says, is the failure “to separate the liberties of commerce from the emancipation of individuals in their intellectual, electoral, behavioral, and moral capacities" (320).  The WSM would be better off, he suggests, if it protected economic liberty but repressed personal liberty (the “intellectual, electoral, behavioral, and moral capacities”).  But I don’t see how that would work.  For example, if intellectual liberty were suppressed, that would have made the Scientific Revolution impossible, and yet Balch insists that the WSM would have been impossible without modern science.

Balch identifies four ways in which WSM has been weakened by its promotion of personal liberty (178-180, 317-320; 2014, 16-18).  (1) The disarming of the makers—particularly, the waning of the tradition of trained middle-class militia—makes it unlikely that people would ever again rise up in arms to defend their liberties from tyranny.  (2) Modern mass democracy has favored the expansion of the modern welfare state, which has become a new taker regime, although the “take” is not just for a few takers but widely distributed among many.  (3) The personal freedom of thought and speech has given too much power to intellectual elites who attack the liberal social and political order by elevating taking over making.  (4) The personal freedom to choose hedonistic lifestyles--such as pursuing sexual pleasure without producing or caring for children--weakens our moral character and lowers our genetic fitness.

Although I see some truth in all four of these points, I see no reason here to conclude that the WSM has been, or will soon be, destroyed by its promotion of personal liberty.   Ultimately, this comes down to a question of empirical evidence.  Is there any evidence for a trade-off between economic freedom and personal freedom, as Balch suggests, so that as personal freedom goes up, economic freedom goes down?  On the contrary, it seems to me, that in most countries, higher personal freedom is correlated with higher economic freedom.  I see evidence for that in the Human Freedom Index.

In the Human Freedom Index, for each of 87 indicators of freedom, countries are scored on a scale of 0 to 10, where 10 represents the highest level of freedom.  The scores for each of 12 subcategories are averaged.  These are then averaged for personal freedom and economic freedom.  The final score for freedom in general is the average of these two, so that personal freedom and economic freedom are weighed equally.  The Human Freedom Index 2025 ranks countries based on data for 2023.

Here is a sampling of the rankings, with the scores for Personal Freedom (PF), Economic Freedom (EF), and Human Freedom (HF).

1.     Switzerland (PF: 9.77, EF: 8.28, HF: 9.15)

2.     Denmark (PF: 9.75, EF: 8.02, HF: 9.15)

3.     New Zealand (PF: 9.51, EF: 8.33, HF: 9.02)

4.     Ireland (PF: 9.54, EF: 8.05, HF: 8.92)

15. USA (PF: 9.15, EF: 8.10, HF: 8.71)

19. UK (PF: 9.12, EF: 7.88, HF: 8.60)

162. Sudan (PF: 3.97, EF: 4.00, HF: 3.98)

162. Yemen (PF: 3.19, EF: 5.08, HF: 3.98)

164. Iran (PF: 3.36, EF: 4.37, HF: 3.78)

165. Syria (PF: 2.31, EF: 4.62, HF: 3.27)

The United States ranks at 15^th in Human Freedom, 22^nd in Personal Freedom, and 5^th in Economic Freedom.

I don’t see any confirmation here of Balch's prediction that increasing personal freedom is correlated with decreasing economic freedom.  On the contrary, economic freedom and personal freedom seem to go up or down together.

There are a few exceptions, however.  For 2023, Singapore ranks #2 in economic freedom out of 165 countries (score: 8.50), but only #84 in personal freedom (score: 7.19), which gives Singapore an overall human freedom rank of #51 (score: 7.73).  Hong Kong SAR (Special Administrative Region) shows the same pattern of high economic freedom but low personal freedom: #1 out of 165 in economic freedom (score: 8.55), but #88 in personal freedom (score: 7.05), with an overall human freedom ranking of #53 (score: 7.68).

Having been a British colony, Hong Kong was returned to Chinese authority in 1997, and beginning around 2012, China imposed severe restrictions on personal freedom in Hong Kong.  For the year 2012, the Human Freedom Index ranked Hong Kong as #1 in human freedom, #1 in economic freedom, and #18 in personal freedom.  So there was a big drop in personal freedom from 2012 to 2023.

Would Balch have to say that Singapore and Hong Kong today have achieved the most desirable form of the "World Safe for Making," because they have high economic freedom but low personal freedom, and so they are free from the social weaknesses that arise from too much personal freedom?

The problem, however, is that both Singapore and Hong Kong show what Balch regards as the greatest social weakness of modern liberal societies--a low fertility rate. Singapore's total fertility rate is 1.26.  Hong Kong's is 1.44.  This is well below the replacement level of 2.1.  By comparison, the fertility rate for the U.S. is 1.79.

I don’t understand why Balch thinks the “demographic transition" is a threat to "human species survival" (183, 188).  Obviously, with over 8.3 billion people alive today, the world is not underpopulated.  Even those free societies with low birth rates can have growing populations as long as their freedom attracts immigrants.   That was Locke's argument for open borders and evolutionary group selection.

Parents investing in a small number of children is a prudent reproductive strategy in certain ecological conditions.  It can be explained by an "embodied capital theory of life history evolution" (Kim Hill and Hillard Kaplan).  There are many trade-offs in parental investment.  One of them is the tradeoff between the quantity of offspring (investing in a large number of offspring but with each receiving little investment) and the quality of children (investing in a lesser number of offspring but with each receiving a lot of investment).  In a bourgeois liberal society, many parents will choose quality over quantity.

I see no evidence of any weakening in the natural desire for parental care in America or elsewhere.  The Pew Research Center has reported that the percentage of American women ages 40-44 who are mothers rose to 86% in 2016 from a low of 80% in 2006 and close to the high of 90% in 1976.

Presumably, Balch would support governmental programs for raising fertility rates.  But there's no reason to believe that such programs work.  Strangely, he claims that Italian Fascism and German National Socialism were “genocratic utopias” in supporting ethnic genetic interests, as argued by Pierre Van Den Bergh and Frank Salter (57, 102, 133, 186)?  But Salter has complained that the drop in the total fertility rate for native Germans continued under the Nazis, and that none of the “ethnic states” has ever raised the fertility of their ethnic group.  As I noted in a previous post, despite Victor Orban's vigorous "pro-family" policies, Hungary still has one of the lowest fertility rates for any country.

IS THE WELFARE STATE A NEW TAKING REGIME?

Another way in which personal freedom subverts economic freedom, according to Balch, is through the expansion of the modern welfare state into a new kind of taking regime.  He worries about the "'taking-favoring' redistributive creeds like social democracy" that promote the modern welfare state.  He muses:

The heightened power . . . that the "world-made-safe-making" gave the propertyless led to a conceptual inversion, a means of preventing state redistribution become one for advancing and legitimating it.  The triumph of personhood over property secured slavery's demise, full equality of women and other historic achievements, but it also transformed property from the cynosure of freedom into a political parceled entitlement.

. . .

It's true, that unlike yesteryear, today's "take" is not just for the mighty but widely distributed among (as well as taken from) all-and-sundry.  With votes to bestow on politicos, some of the masses have become net "taking" winners, a plus perhaps in the scales of justice, if not necessarily for social productivity and individual autonomy (2014, 18).

Against this, I have argued that a capitalist welfare state can be compatible with individual liberty in securing both personal freedom and economic freedom.  Here what I argue is similar to what Friedrich Hayek recommended in Part 3 of The Constitution of Liberty, which was entitled "Freedom in the Welfare State."

The most extensive welfare states in Europe are in the Nordic social democracies--Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Norway, and Iceland.  Although they are sometimes identified as democratic socialist systems, they are not really socialist in any strict sense. Rather, these are all capitalist welfare states in that they combine social welfare programs with largely free-market capitalism.

This is indicated by their Human Freedom Index rankings for Human Freedom (HF), Personal Freedom (PF), and Economic Freedom.

                       HF    PF    EF

Denmark         #2     #2    #9

Finland           #7     #9    #15

Iceland           #11   #11  #23

Sweden          #12   #6    #35

Norway         #16   #4    #48

This compares favorably with the U.S.--#15 (HF), #22 (PF), and #5 (EF).

With the possible exception of Norway, there does not seem to be any correlation between a high ranking for personal freedom and a low ranking for economic freedom.

To me, this indicates that the capitalist welfare state belongs to the "World Safe for Making."  It is not a new taking regime.

The Fall of Orban's "Illiberal Democracy." Fukuyama Was Right.

 

        Viktor Orban with J. D. Vance and Rod Dreher in Washington, D.C., November 2025

     

                                                                        Peter Magyar

"It's nice to have a strong man running your country."  That's what Donald Trump once said about Viktor Orban, the Prime Minister of Hungary.  One indication of his political strength is that he has been Prime Minister since 2010, which makes him the longest serving Prime Minister in Europe.

But that could be ended by the parliamentary elections coming up on April 12, because polling shows that Peter Magyar is leading Orban in the race to become the next Prime Minister.  Magyar is a former Orban loyalist in Orban's Fidesz party who now leads the opposition party Tisza.

If Orban loses, that would signal the collapse of the international right-wing movement for populist nationalism because Orban's illiberal regime in Hungary has been the model for that movement.  That explains why Trump and Vance have endorsed Orban for reelection, and why Vance has been visiting Hungary to support Orban.  There are reports that Vance will appear with Orban at a campaign rally in Budapest a few days before the election.  Trump and Vance are desperately worried that Orban's defeat would be a crushing blow to the international MAGA movement.

But Magyar's victory would be just the final nail in the coffin for Orban's regime, which has been in decline for years now.  There are at least three signs of that decline.  Orban's policies for strengthening Hungary's families have failed to raise the female fertility rate.  Orban's promotion of a "Christian Hungary" has failed to revive Hungarian Christianity.  And, finally, huge numbers of Hungarians have been voting with their feet against Orban's regime by emigrating to Western European countries that offer them a better life than what they can have in Hungary.  The fact that these emigrants are going to those European nations that rank high on the Human Freedom Index confirms the argument of Francis Fukuyama that most human beings today regard the liberal social order that secures human freedom as the best regime.

THE ILLIBERAL STATE

As a young student and lawyer, Orban was originally a liberal anti-communist.  In 1988, he was one of the founders of the Alliance of Young Democrats (with the acronym FIDESZ), which challenged the Hungarian Young Communist League.  In 1989, Fidesz became a political party that supported the overthrow of the communist regime in 1990.

In 1989, Orban studied at Oxford University on a research fellowship funded by George Soros, the Hungarian-born philanthropist whom Orban now denounces as the conspiratorial funder of liberal causes in Eastern Europe.

In 1990, he left Oxford early so that he could return to Hungary to run in the first post-communist parliamentary elections.  He was elected a Member of Parliament, and he became a leader in Fidesz.

In 1994, after Fidesz lost the parliamentary elections badly, Orban decided that if he was to have any chance of becoming Prime Minister, he would have to move Fidesz away from its center-liberal position and towards the sort of right-wing populism that had propelled Silvio Berlusconi to become prime minister of Italy (Higgins 2025; Szelenyi 2022).  He was willing to change his political principles if he thought that would help him win votes and gain political power.  And, indeed, he became prime minister in 1998.  But he lost the general election in 2002.

In 2010, Orban returned as prime minister, and this time, he wanted to make sure that he would remain in power for many years.  He began silencing or taking over media outlets that he considered hostile to Fidesz.  He had the government fund an elaborate propaganda apparatus serving Fidesz.  He wrote a new constitution that would make it difficult for his opponents to win control of the parliament.  He removed the civil service protection for many government employees, and replaced them with his loyalists. He also took control of the courts so that he could appoint judges loyal to him.  

All of this supported what Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way (2002, 2010) have called "competitive authoritarianism."  Somewhere between a fully authoritarian regime and a fully democratic regime, a competitive authoritarian regime has multiparty elections, but they are not completely free and fair, because the incumbent's abuse of power tilts the electoral playing field against the opposition, and basic civil liberties are restricted to make it hard for the opposition to challenge the ruling party.

Under competitive authoritarianism, opposition forces can compete seriously for power.  And, occasionally, the opposition can win an election, and the incumbents lose.  But this regime is still not fully democratic, because the ruling party uses its power over the government to attack opponents and co-opt critics.

These three regime types are distinguished by the kind of countervailance--power checking power--that they allow.  A fully authoritarian regime allows little or no countervailance.  A fully democratic regime allows strong countervailance.  A competitive authoritarian regime allows weak countervailance.

In a speech in 2014 that attracted attention around the world, Orban explained that "the new state that we are constructing in Hungary is an illiberal state."  He said that this would break away from the principles of liberal democracy that had dominated the global regime (including Hungary) from 1990 to 2010.  Beginning with the global financial crisis of 2008, he argued, it had become clear that the Western liberal social, economic, and political order based on the principle of individual freedom had failed.  This created an opening for newly emerging global powers based on illiberal nationalism--nations like Singapore, China, India, Russia, and Turkey.

Previously, Orban observed, the liberal states in Western Europe had been organized around the liberal principle of individual freedom: "With regard to the relationship between two people, the starting point of the liberal organization of society is based on the idea that we have the right to do anything that does not infringe on the freedom of the other party."  Here Orban paraphrased the definition of freedom adopted by John Locke--freedom as not being constrained or coerced by others, so long as one does not infringe on the same freedom for others (see Locke, Second Treatise, para. 57).

Notably, Orban did not completely reject this liberal principle of freedom.  But he did insist that this would not be the central organizing principle of the illiberal state.

What is happening in Hungary today can accordingly be interpreted by stating that the prevailing political leadership has today attempted to ensure that people's personal work and interests, which must be acknowledged, are closely linked to the life of the community and the nation, and that this relationship is preserved and reinforced.  In other words, the Hungarian nation is not simply a group of individuals but a community that must be organized, reinforced and in fact constructed.  And so in this sense, the new state that we are constructing in Hungary is an illiberal state, a non-liberal state.  It does not reject the fundamental principles of liberalism such as freedom, and I could list a few more, but it does not make this ideology the central element of state organization, but instead includes a different, special, national approach.

So Orban's illiberal state would secure some individual freedom, but there must also be a "national approach," because "the Hungarian nation is not simply a group of individuals but a community."  Here you see why the conservative communitarian critics of liberal individualism--like Patrick Deneen, Roger Scruton, and Rod Dreher--have all made their pilgrimages to Budapest to honor Orban and receive his praises for their promotion of Orbanism in the United States and the UK (Szelenyi 2022).  Dreher moved to Budapest in 2022 so that he could be a part of Orban's propaganda operation--particularly, the Danube Institute, a state-backed think tank for disseminating Orban's ideology (Worth 2026).

I should say, however, that the Danube Institute does show some commitment to the liberal principle of open debate and freedom of thought.  Their mission statement includes this passage:

Our primary audience is the universe of centre-right intellectuals, political leaders, and public-spirited citizens. But we will also engage our counterparts on the democratic center-left in vigorous and principled public debate on as many occasions as possible and appropriate. We hope to draw upon the best minds of our day across national boundaries in international forums.

A recent example of their commitment to the liberal principle of intellectual freedom and debate is their event debating the question "Is Liberalism a Threat to Religious Liberty?"  One of the invited participants was Andrew Koppelman, a law professor at Northwestern University, who is best known for his philosophic and legal arguments for gay rights.  His response to the proposed question was to suggest that this was a weird question, because since religious liberty originated as a principle of Lockean liberalism, to suggest that liberalism could threaten religious liberty was nonsensical.

If you peruse the website of the Danube Institute, you can see their concern for thinking through all of the themes of Orban's illiberal state, two of the most prominent being Christianity and family life.

DECLINING CHRISTIANITY

In 2018, Orban declared that Hungary must be a "Christian democracy," and "a Christian democracy cannot be liberal" (Orban 2018).  A Christian democracy cannot be liberal because "it gives priority to Christian culture" over all other cultures, and therefore it denies the liberal principle of multiculturalism.

But Orban was vague about what exactly he meant by "Christian culture."  Most confusing was his claim that in affirming the importance of Christian culture, he was not affirming any Christian doctrines of faith.

Christian democracy is not about defending religious articles of faith--in this case Christian religious articles of faith.  Neither states nor governments have competence on questions of damnation or salvation.  Christian democratic politics means that the ways of life springing from Christian culture must be protected.  Our duty is not to defend the articles of faith, but the forms of being that have grown from them.  These include human dignity, the family, and the nation--because Christianity does not seek to attain universality through the abolition of nations, but through the preservation of nations.  Other forms which must be protected and strengthened include our faith communities.  This--and not the protection of religious articles of faith--is the duty of Christian democracy.

Orban's statement is incoherent.  On the one hand, he says that a Christian democracy must be illiberal.  On the other hand, he says that a Christian democracy must not enforce any religious articles of faith and must secure the freedom of all "faith communities," which sounds like the liberal principle of religious liberty and toleration.  

Christian democracy would be truly illiberal if it meant some form of Christian integralism or theocracy (like medieval Catholicism or 17th century Massachusetts Bay Colony).  But clearly Orban does not want that.  If he doesn't want the state to enforce any religious doctrines, that sounds like liberal democracy.  Indeed, Rod Dreher has said that authentic Christianity "can't exist if liberal democracy goes away" (Worth 2026, 36).  And as Koppelman pointed out, when the Danube Institute defends religious liberty, they're defending a fundamental principle of Lockean liberalism.

Moreover, if Christianity supports "the preservation of nations," as Orban says, does that mean the preservation of nations with diverse religious traditions?  Europe has some predominantly Muslim countries--such as Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, and Turkey--and in some cases, these Islamic traditions go back to the Middle Ages.  So it would seem that Orban's nationalism would have to allow for Islamic nationalism.  But then Orban's Christian democracy has been interpreted by many of his supporters as a defense of Christian Europe against Islam.

Another problem here is that by insisting that the state must not enforce any religious doctrines, Orban implies that religious freedom should include freedom of thought for atheists.  The fundamental religious doctrine of monotheism is "I believe in God the Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and Earth" (the Apostle's Creed), and if Orban does not think the state can enforce belief in that doctrine, then he must think that atheists are free from persecution.

So in saying that Christian democracy supports Christian culture but not Christian doctrines, Orban implicitly endorses the kind of atheistic religiosity promoted by conservatives like Roger Scruton, who want to enjoy the religious feelings that sacralize a national culture but without the religious belief in the real existence of God outside the human mind.  (The vacuousness of ritualized Christian culture without Christian belief was manifest three years ago in the coronation of King Charles III as the Christian King of Great Britain.)

But in the long run, believing in the importance of Christian culture without believing in the truth of Christian doctrines fails to slow the decline of that Christian culture.  We can see that in Orban's Hungary.

According to the Hungarian Central Statistical Office, the majority of Hungarians do not identify themselves as religious.  In the census of 2022, 42.5% identified themselves as Christians, 1.3% as non-Christian religious believers, 16.1% as not religious, and 40.1% refused to answer.  Since it's unlikely that religious believers would refuse to answer the question, those who did refuse are probably not religious.  That means, then, that 56.2% of Hungarians do not identify themselves as religious.  And since most of the houses of worship in Hungary reportedly have few people attending, we can assume that most of those who identify themselves as religious are not devout believers.

If creating a Christian democracy in Hungary means that at least a majority of Hungarians are serious Christians, then Orban has failed to achieve that.

But that doesn't mean that Christianity cannot rebound in Hungary.  The number of Catholics and Reformed Protestants has dropped by about one half in 20 years.  But Hungary's fastest growing Christian church is the Hungarian Faith Church, which is a charismatic Pentecostal form of Christianity.  With its headquarters in Budapest, it has over 150,000 members, of which over 70,000 are in Hungary.  In a nation of 9.8 million people, those are impressive numbers when you consider that this church was founded as recently as 1979 by seven Hungarians.  Notably, Orban's son Gaspar Orban converted in 2014 to the Faith Church, and he has even become a minister in the church who claims to have received revelations from God and witnessed miraculous healings.

As I have argued, Christianity originated as a charismatic or Pentecostal form of religion rooted in animistic shamanism.  Animism was the first religion, and shamans were its first practitioners.  The religious experience of animistic shamanism is the natural seed in the human mind from which all subsequent religions have evolved.

The defining feature of Pentecostal doctrine is the teaching that all true Christians can be filled with the Holy Spirit, and the most prominent gifts of the Holy Spirit include healing, praying, prophesying, and preaching through speaking in tongues.  Here we see, once again, Christians becoming shamans who, through extraordinary states of ecstasy, engage with divine entities and provide services like healing and divination.

                              A Fresco of the Pentecostal Dove, Symbolizing the Holy Spirit

As long as we have liberal social orders with religious liberty, we will have free markets in religion that will allow the more charismatic Pentecostal religions to gain a growing share of the market because they appeal to the natural human desire for religious transcendence in making contact with the spiritual world through shamanic practices.  Pentecostalism is the fastest growing religious movement in the world, with over 600 million adherents worldwide.  So while Christianity in general might be in decline today in Hungary and elsewhere, we can expect a continuing revival of charismatic Christianity.

DECLINING FAMILIES

One reason why Christian culture is so important for Orban is that he sees it as supporting the traditional family with lots of children.  And that's important because families having and rearing many children resolves what Orban has said (in a 2017 speech) is "the greatest existential question for European civilization"--Will the drastic decline in Europe's population continue until there are hardly any Europeans left?

In that 2017 speech, Orban lamented that the population of Hungary had declined from 10,709,000 in 1980 to 9,799,000 in 2017, so that in less than 40 years, Hungary had lost almost a million people, which was more than all the casualties that Hungary sustained in World War II.

Orban announced that "Making Families Strong Again" would be the motto for the Hungarian government's family policies directed to raising the birth rate.  He explained:

It is important to highlight that the restoration of natural reproduction is a national cause; and it is not just one national cause among many, but the national cause.  And it is also a European cause: not just one European cause among many, but the European cause.  The goal of the Government of Hungary is to raise our birth rate to 2.1 per cent by 2030, which would be a replacement rate for our society.  At present, this figure stands at 1.5 per cent.

The technical term for the birth rate is the "total fertility rate" (TFR), which is a measure of an imaginary woman who passes through her reproductive life subject to all the age-specific fertility rates for the ages 15-49 that were recorded for a given population in a given year.  So this rate is the number of children a woman would have if she was subject to prevailing fertility rates at all ages from a single given year, and if she survived throughout all her childbearing years. 

If there were no mortality until the end of a woman's childbearing years, the replacement level of TFR would be around 2.0.  The replacement fertility rate is close to this for most industrialized countries.  For the global average, the TFR at replacement is about 2.33.  Here "replacement" means maintaining the present level of population into the future.

The drop in fertility rates that has occurred in most of the wealthier nations over the past hundred years has been called "the demographic transition" by demographers.  In the most developed societies today, the rich and powerful tend to have low fertility rates, and it's the lower class people who have higher fertility rates.  So as societies become wealthier, the total fertility rate for the whole society tends to drop, and over the past 70 years, it has dropped below replacement levels.

I have argued that one can explain this in Darwinian terms through the "embodied capital theory of human life history."  In the developed societies, the economic and social success of children depends ever more on their acquired technical skills and educational training, so that as adults they can compete for jobs that require special talents and knowledge. Consequently, rearing successful children in such societies requires that parents make increasingly costlier investments in the education of their children.  And as the cost of children has thus increased, the quantity of children demanded by parents has decreased, because parents now express their natural desire for parenting successful children by investing more resources in fewer children, thereby choosing quality over quantity in their children.

Moreover, for human beings to be able to invest so much in their children, they must first invest time and energy in their own education and career development and in the search for suitable mates.  Consequently, successful people in modern developed societies must often delay their marriage and having children, and thus the average ages for getting married and having the first child have risen.  When women do this, they sometimes reach the end of their reproductive years, and so produce fewer children than they would have desired.  It's likely that one reason for the total fertility rate falling below replacement levels is that couples who desire two or three children delay marriage and reproduction for so long that the women reach the end of their physiological fertility sooner than they had expected.  Then couples must rely on fertility treatments or adoption to satisfy their parental desires.

Orban has been trying to reverse this tendency to lower fertility through governmental policies that promote marriage and large families.  Hungary has a large per-child tax deduction that gets progressively larger with the second and third child.  Mothers of two or more children are exempt from paying income taxes for the rest of their lives.  Women with three or more children can have all of their student loan debt cancelled.  Families with home mortgages can have a large portion of that debt paid by the government in proportion to the number of their children.  The government has built or renovated infant day care centers around the country, and day care costs are heavily subsidized by the government.  The government has also built "family-friendly" infrastructure in the cities, such as beautiful playgrounds and parks, where parents can take their children to play.

But as of now, it appears that all of these pro-family policies have failed to raise the fertility rate.  In 2011, when Orban first became prime minister, Hungary had Europe's lowest TFR at 1.23.  By 2021, it had risen to 1.61.  But in 2025, it was back down to 1.27--essentially, the same all-time low as in 2011.

It is possible that policies designed to incentivize having more children may have had the opposite effect.  For example, providing tax exemptions for mothers of two children might provide a work incentive for those mothers.  European women are career-minded, and giving them tax exemptions could be reinforcing the idea that they should be earning more money, which directs the mother to invest more time and energy in her career rather than in her children.

When it comes to housing, Hungary's policy of subsidizing mortgages could be increasing the demand for housing but not the supply, which creates bidding wars that make homes less affordable.

Now let's consider how Hungary compares with the United States with respect to population growth and the fertility rate.  Unlike Hungary, the population of the U.S. has been growing steadily for over a hundred years.  According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the population of the U.S. has grown every year since 1900, except for one year during the Spanish flu epidemic, growing at an average of 0.85% per year since 2000.  As of today, the population of the U.S. is 342,415,867, which makes it the third largest national population in the world, behind only India and China.

This is surprising since the TFR for the U.S. is only 1.79, which is substantially higher than Hungary's 1.23, but it's still below the replacement level of 2.1.  What explains the growing population despite the below-replacement TFR is immigration.  Consider these calculations for the U.S. from the U.S. Census Bureau:

One birth every 9 seconds

One death every 10 seconds

One international migrant (net) every 97 seconds

Net gain of one person every 45 seconds

This shows that the mistake make by Orban's Hungary has been in limiting immigration into Hungary.  If Hungary had allowed more freedom of movement of immigrants into Hungary, comparable to that allowed by the U.S., Hungary could have had an increasing population.

Now, of course, if Trump's policies for closing the U.S. borders and deporting immigrants continues, this could reverse the century-long trend towards increasing population and bring about the sort of depopulation crisis that has afflicted Hungary.

This supports my argument for open borders and freedom of movement.

DECLINING FREEDOM LEADS TO DECLINING POPULATION

I have pointed to two causes of Hungary's declining population--low fertility rates and low rates of immigration into Hungary.  But there's a third cause: the emigration of Hungarians out of Hungary.

According to Hungary's Central Statistical Office, a total of 367,515 Hungarians have officially left the country during the 15 years that Orban's Fidesz government has been in power.  This is actually an underestimation because foreign statistics often record nearly twice as many new arrivals from Hungary as Hungarian authorities do departures.  Another reason for this being an underestimation is that many Hungarians living abroad retain a Hungarian address.  Adjusting for these factors, there could be as many as 640,000 Hungarian emigrants who have left the country.  Notably, most of these emigrants are aged 25-49 years old--the prime age for people who could contribute to the economic and social life of Hungary.

What's most interesting about these emigrants is that prefer to emigrate to countries that rank high on the Human Freedom Index.  This should not be surprising if one recognizes, as I have argued, that countries ranking high in freedom tend to provide the best conditions for people to live good lives because they have wider opportunities for freely pursuing their happiness.

Here are the five most popular destinations for Hungarian emigrants, with their Human Freedom Index ranking in parentheses: Austria (22), Germany (17), UK (19), Netherlands (9), and Switzerland (1).

By comparison, Hungary ranks 67th out of 165 countries.  Previously, Hungary ranked much higher at 26th in 2009 the year before Orban's Fidesz came to power.  Hungary's rankings have dropped steadily during Orban's time as prime minister.

So Hungarians are voting with their feet against Orban's illiberalism and for freedom secured in a liberal social order.  Declining freedom thus leads to declining population.

LIBERAL DEMOCRACY AT THE END OF HISTORY?

This failure of Orban's illiberal Christian democracy confirms Francis Fukuyama's famous argument in 1989 for "the end of history," in which human beings show their natural desire for the freedom--both economic and personal freedom--that comes from liberal democracy.

Actually, the appeal of the liberal principle of individual freedom is so powerful that even Orban cannot reject it completely.  As we've seen, Orban accepts the importance of securing that Lockean liberal conception of freedom in any good regime, although this cannot be the central organizing principle of his "illiberal state."  Consequently, Orban's "illiberal state" is not absolutely illiberal.  Someone like Rod Dreher (2023) can even defend Orban as the "guardian of liberal freedoms"!

We can see this in Hungary's rankings in the Human Freedom Index.  Under the rule of Orban's Fidesz party from 2010 to the present, Hungary's freedom ranking has fallen from 26th to 67th out of 165 countries.  But notice that a 67th ranking puts Hungary well above the world average.  Most countries rank lower.  Here are some examples of the lower ranking countries:  Mexico (91), Indonesia (92), India (110), Kuwait (113), China (149), Russia (152), and Iran (164).

If you look at how Hungary ranks in the various categories of personal freedom and economic freedom, where 10 is the highest possible score, you will see that Hungary ranks low in "rule of law" (4.9), "expression and information" (5.4), and "size of government" (6.1).  But Hungary ranks high in "freedom of movement" (9.9), "security and safety" (9.6), and "freedom in relationships" (8.8).

Thus, Orban's illiberal democracy is really very liberal, but not liberal enough for those Hungarians who have voted with their feet against Orban by leaving the country, and for those who will vote against him in the coming election.

REFERENCES

Dreher, Rod. 2023. "Orban: Guardian of Liberal Freedoms." The Critic, November.

Higgins, Andrew. 2025. "Viktor Orban's 'Propaganda State' Is Starting to Show Cracks." New York Times, October 12.

Levitsky, Steven, and Lucan Way. 2002. "The Rise of Competitive Authoritarianism." Journal of Democracy 13 (April): 51-65.

Levitsky, Steven, and Lucan Way. 2010. Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes After the Cold War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Orban, Viktor. 2014. "Speech at the 25th Balvanyos Summer Free University." July 26. Tusnadfurdo (Baile Tusnad), Romania.

Orban, Viktor. 2017. "Speech at the 2nd Budapest Demographic Forum."  May 25.

Orban, Viktor. 2018. "Speech at the 29th Balvanyos Summer Free University." July 28.