Does the Evolution of Open Access Societies Show Moral Progress in History?

Looking over the deep evolutionary history of human social order, we can see two great social revolutions.  The First Social Revolution was the Neolithic revolution 10,000 to 5,000 years ago, when our human ancestors for the first time adopted agricultural production as their primary source of food--cultivating domesticated plants and herding domesticated animals rather than gathering wild plants and hunting wild animals.  Eventually, this led to the sedentary life of villages and towns and finally the first bureaucratic states in Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, the Indus river valley, Mesoamerica, and South America (the Incas).  The Second Social Revolution was the modern revolution that began about 250 years ago that led to industrialized liberal commercial democracies, beginning in Great Britain, the United States, and France.

The First Social Revolution brought a decline in violence and an increase in prosperity and population.  The Second Social Revolution brought an even greater decline in violence and an even greater increase in prosperity and population.

Explaining how and why these social revolutions occurred is one of the fundamental projects for the social sciences.  More than that, explaining these social revolutions has deep implications for how we interpret the meaning of human life on earth.  Has life been getting better in ways that suggest that human history is generally progressive?  Does this include moral progress?  Or is the pattern of history better understood as one of decline?  Or is it neither progressive nor declining but cyclical or random?  Is history purposeful?  Or is it foolish to see any purposeful pattern in history?  If there is any pattern in human history, does that show some divine or cosmic intelligence at work?  Or can any historical pattern be explained by purely human factors?

Douglass C. North, John Joseph Wallis, and Barry Weingast have written one of the most instructive books for thinking about such questions--Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History (Cambridge University Press, 2009).  They argue that the two great social revolutions can be understood by asking two questions.  How does a society manage the problem of violence?  And how does a society support and control access to organizations?  In answering those questions, one can distinguish three distinct social orders: the foraging order, the limited access order (also called "the natural state"), and the open access order.

All societies face the problem of how to control violence.  In the foraging order of hunter-gatherers, which was the social order for most of human evolutionary history, violence was controlled through personal knowledge and personal interaction.  Those who initiated violence provoked violent retaliation.  Conflict was mediated through customary norms.  Although violence could be limited in foraging groups, the threat of violence was ever present both within and between small bands and larger tribal units.  Such foraging bands were small--perhaps 25 or so individuals--although they could be occasionally brought together into tribal communities of hundreds of individuals.  The primary organizational form was the family and kinship groups.  The level of violence within and between foraging groups can be very high.

With the development of agriculture in the First Social Revolution, there arose the first large sedentary groups with tens of thousands of individuals, which allowed for the emergence of the first states and of what North, Wallis, and Weingast call limited access orders.  These states were ruled by elites--a small group of powerful individuals exercising political, economic, religious, and social authority over a much larger group of subordinate individuals.  There was a decline in violence because the state provided third-party enforcement of agreements and relationships between individuals and organizations. 

But to assume the Weberian definition of the state as holding a monopoly on the legitimate exercise of violence is mistaken, because this assumes away the problem of violence:  when many powerful individuals can exercise violence, how can they commit themselves to an agreement to stop fighting?  Even if a single individual is designated as the king, he cannot rule without the support of a coalition of powerful individuals leading organizations.  To control violence, a limited access order must form a dominant coalition of powerful individuals who agree not to fight one another, and they agree to this because membership in the coalition gives them special privileges--most importantly, the privileged access to organizations supported by the state that give them entry to valued resources (such as land, labor, and capital) and valued activities (like religion and education).

The economic benefits of these privileges are what economists today call "rents":  a rent is the excess payment for an economic resource over the amount necessary to keep that resource in its current use.  So, for example, if someone is paid $15 an hour for work he would be willing to do for $10 an hour, then the extra $5 an hour is rent.  Political restrictions on who may enter a field of economic activity can create an artificial scarcity of entrants in the field, which secures excess returns or rents for those with the privilege access.  The practice of doing this is called "rent-seeking" activity.

From the emergence of the first states about 5,000 years ago to the beginning of the 19th century, almost all states were what North, Wallis, and Weingast call limited access orders, because the privilege of forming political, economic, and social organizations that the state would support was limited to elites in the dominant coalition.  There is a great variety in the kinds of regimes that can be recognized as limited access orders--from ancient Mesopotamia to Tudor England to Putin's Russia.

North, Wallis, and Weingast distinguish three levels of development among limited access orders--fragile, basic, and mature.  A fragile limited access order can barely preserve any peaceful order from collapsing into violence, because the dominant coalition is unstable and constantly shifting with the changing fortunes of individual members.  Contemporary examples would be Iraq, Afghanistan, and Somalia.

A basic limited access order can preserve a stable organizational structure based on the dominant coalition of elites.  Recent examples would be the Soviet Union, Saudi Arabia, and Mexico from the 1940s to the 1980s.

A mature limited access order can sustain durable institutional structures for the state while also supporting some elite organizations outside the state.  Recent examples would be Mexico since the 1990s, Brazil, India, and China.

According to North, Wallis, and Weingast, the transition from mature limited access orders to open access orders began for the first time in the first half of the 19th century--in the United States, Great Britain, and France.  The open access order is distinctive in how it handles the problem of violence and in how it handles access to organizations. 

First, it handles violence by fulfilling the Weberian condition for the state in that the government holds a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence, and there are social and political controls on the use of violence by the military and the police.

Second, an open access order allows most citizens to have open access to political, economic, or social organizations that the state will support.  These organisations are free to compete with one another in peaceful ways.

The opening of access to economic and political organizations is clearly seen in the 1840s and 1850s in the United States and Great Britain.  In both countries, there were general laws of incorporation that allowed citizens to form corporations with legally stipulated rights and duties through procedures for registration and minimal conditions impersonally applied.  Previously, corporations had been formed by governments as special privileges for influential elites.  Each corporate charter was separately created, and there was no open access to incorporation.  But with the general laws of incorporation, what previously was an elite privilege was openly available based on impersonal standards for registration as a corporation.  As a consequence, there was a huge increase in the number of corporations in the United States and Great Britain.  And this was correlated with modern growth rates.  The most prosperous societies tend to be those with large numbers of economic organizations.

At the same time, in the United States and Great Britain, the first party systems emerged, in which ever larger numbers of citizens were free to register as voters identified as members of a political party.  Organizational entry to political competition became as open as organizational entry to economic competition.  Never before in history had people been free to form new economic and political organizations at will.

Although North, Wallis, and Weingast emphasize open entry to economic and political organizations, they suggest that open entry to social organizations was also important for the open access order.  Social organizations would include religious groups, educational institutions, and all kinds of voluntary associations.  One of the crucial manifestations of more open access to social organizations in the 19th century, in the U.S. and England, was the extension of religious toleration to allow for a free competition of religious groups.  Thus, the principle of open access was extended to the polity, the economy, and the society.

North, Wallis, and Weingast draw their fundamental insight about the open access order from Joseph Schumpeter's Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1942)--particularly, his  conception of the process of "creative destruction" through free competition.  Open access orders allow creative political, economic, and social destruction through competition, in which successful enterprises proliferate and failed enterprises are eliminated.  Society secures open access to organizations as vehicles for political, economic, and social entrepreneurs to compete in implementing their ideas.  Such free competition in political, economic, and social experimentation allows a social order to achieve adaptive efficiency responding to new and unpredictable challenges.

North, Wallis, and Weingast estimate that as many as twenty-five countries have made the transition to the open access order, and that these countries constitute about fifteen or twenty percent of the population of the world today.  These are the most prosperous and generally the most developed countries in the world.  The rest of the world is still dominated by limited access orders that are less prosperous and less developed.  And yet even these countries with limited access orders benefit from trading with and learning from the countries with open access orders.

The argument of North, Wallis, and Weingast has deep implications for international development policy--as indicated in a new book that they have edited: In the Shadow of Violence: Politics, Economics, and the Problems of Development (Cambridge University Press, 2013).  If they are right, the policies of the World Bank and other international development agencies have failed, because in promoting the adoption of free markets and democratic elections in developing countries, these policies will destabilise the elite coalitions in limited access orders and promote violence rather than economic and political development.  Elections and markets don't work as well in limited access orders as they do in open access orders, and achieving a successful transition from limited access to open access is very hard.  This explains the failures of development policy in countries like Iraq and Afghanistan.

The advice of North, Wallis, and Weingast to agencies like the World Bank is to find ways to promote the movement of fragile and basic limited access orders to mature limited access orders, which provide the doorstep conditions for an eventual transition to open access--conditions such as the rule of law for elites, stable elite organizations inside and outside the framework of the state, and centralized control of the military.

But what about my original question?  Does this movement from foraging orders to limited access orders to open access orders show progress in history--moral, political, and economic progress?

In Violence and Social Orders, North, Wallis, and Weingast deny that there is any historical teleology in their work: "There is no teleology built into the framework: it is a dynamic explanation of social change, not of social progress" (xii).  And they imply that as empirical social scientists who assume the fact/value dichotomy, they cannot scientifically make moral judgments.

And yet they repeatedly use language that indicates not just social change, but social progress.  After all, the very idea of "development" and of distinguishing "developing" and "developed" countries implies a moral teleology.  Similarly, the idea of "mature" forms of limited access orders carries the same implication.

They speak of how "good political institutions" promote prosperity (3).  They speak of how sometimes mature forms of limited access orders can "regress" to basic forms (49).  They also argue that open access orders are "better at constructing effective responses to novel problems," because they have "a greater degree of adaptive efficiency" in promoting experimentation such that "successful adaptations remain while failures tend to disappear" (133, 252).  They conclude that "open access produces enough output to make everyone, elite and non-elite, better off" (188).

Clearly, there is no teleology here if by that one means an inevitably determined movement in one direction towards one final end.  There can be "regression" in the history of limited access orders, falling back from mature forms to basic and fragile forms.  And while no country that has made the transition to an open access order has fallen back into a limited access order, there is no reason to think this could never happen.

And yet there is a teleology here if by that one means that there are better and worse forms of social order, and that recent history has brought better social orders into existence--the orders that provide open access to political, economic, and social competition.

But what's our standard of better and worse?  North, Wallis, and Weingast are vague about this, as when they speak of how "open access produces enough output to make everyone, elite and non-elite, better off."  By "output" they seem to mean material prosperity, and the progress in that respect is clearly and easily measurable.  Gregory Clark's A Farewell to Alms and Matt Ridley's Rational Optimist survey the evidence for the amazing improvement in the material standard of living brought by open access societies.  And Steven Pinker's Better Angels of Our Nature shows the evidence for the equally amazing decline in violence across human history and particularly in the last few centuries.

I would argue for an even broader standard in measuring how open access societies have made us "better off."  As I have often maintained on this blog, there are at least 20 natural desires that constitute the evolved generic goods of life.  An open access order--with its open polity, open economy, and open society--provides the political, economic, and social liberties that constitute the conditions for the fullest satisfaction of those natural desires over a whole life.

This supports the case for Darwinian liberalism--for the idea that open competition of ideas and practices in political, economic, and social life promotes "adaptive efficiency" in pursuing the human goods of life.

It is remarkable that North, Wallis, and Weingast don't follow the logic of open competition in politics to what might seem to be its final end--eliminating the governmental monopoly in violence through a free competition of governments for consumers of security.  That's the conclusion drawn by liberal anti-statists, beginning with Gustave de Molinari, a Belgian-born writer who became one of the leading French liberal economists in the 19th century.  In 1849, in his essay on "The Production of Security," Molinari argued that if free markets can and should provide goods and services at the least cost through free competition, then free markets should likewise provide the services of protection through the free competition of governments.  This would eliminate the present monopoly in the legitimate exercise of violence claimed by the modern state, and thus eliminate the exploitation that such monopoly power conveys to those elite groups that exercise governmental power.  Molinari's argument was debated in 1849 at a meeting of the Societe d'Economie Politique, where Charles Dunoyer criticized Moliari's proposal as unrealistic and claimed that governmental exploitation could be minimized through the open competition of political parties in an electoral system of democratic representation. 

North, Wallis, and Weingast embrace Dunoyer's position, although they seem to be unaware of this debate among the French liberals over Molinari's argument.  The problem, however, is that party competition in a democracy does not eliminate governmental rent-seeking.  In fact, North, Wallis, and Weingast admit this, but they insist that, at least, rent-seeking that benefits only a narrow interest is "much less likely to occur in an open access society than in a natural state" (24, 141).  And yet they also indicate that an open access society tends to promote more growth in the size of government than is the case in a limited access society (122-25).  They defend the growth in the modern welfare state as a way of redistributing wealth that does not disrupt markets.  But if this growth in governmental intervention in the economy and society is unlimited, how can this not disrupt markets and threaten liberty?  If monopolies are necessarily inefficient and exploitative, then won't a government with a Weberian monopoly in the legitimate exercise of coercive violence be inefficient and exploitative?

Douglass North's summary of his book in a lecture can be found here.  Barry Weingast's PowerPoint outline of the book can be found here.

My posts on Deirdre McCloskey's criticism of North's institutionalism for failing to see how the ethical ideas of bourgeois equality and dignity brought the Great Enrichment can be found here.

A post on the theory of "minimum winning coalitions" can be found here.

A post on how "private governance" can replace governance by the state can be found here.

Athens in the Evolution of Liberalism

To ask about the place of ancient Athens in the evolution of liberalism must seem to many people to make no sense.  If liberalism is a distinctively modern way of thinking about social order, and if truly liberal societies have appeared only in the last two centuries, then one might assume that ancient Athens and classical Greece in general are not part of the liberal tradition.

Scholars on the political Left would deny that there was any economic liberalism in Athens, because they have been persuaded by those like Karl Polanyi--in The Great Transformation (1944)--who argue that the market economics of liberal capitalism is a recent cultural invention of modernity, and that for thousands of years societies have organized the production and distribution of goods through social and political planning without markets.  In the ancient world, markets did not matter.

Scholars on the political Right would deny that there was any social or political liberalism in Athens, because they have been persuaded by those like Leo Strauss--in Liberalism Ancient and Modern (1968) and other writings--that Athens was like all premodern regimes in being a closed society, in contrast to the open society sought by modern liberalism.  In his vehement criticism of Eric Havelock's claim--in his book The Liberal Temper in Greek Politics--that there was a liberal tradition of thought in ancient Greece, Strauss observed: "The city of Athens was rather liberal, but not so liberal as to tolerate every pursuit and every teaching.  It seems that that city was so much opposed to Protagoras' activity that it had his writings burned and himself expelled" (47).  And, of course, the Athenian trial and execution of Socrates for impiety and corrupting the young was for Strauss the dramatic manifestation of the inevitable conflict between society and philosophy.

Here one can see Strauss's mistaken acceptance of the traditional view of the ancient Greek polis as a fusion of state and society--with no distinction between the public and private spheres of life--in which the conduct of all citizens in all areas of life was regulated by the state.  This was true for Sparta but not for Athens.  In Sparta, everything was regulated by the state.  It was what Karl Popper called a "closed society."  But in Athens, there was a separation between the public sphere of the polis and the private sphere in which citizens were free to live as they pleased as long as they obeyed the laws.  In this way, Athens was an "open society."  Strauss's view of the polis as a fusion of state and society showed the influence on him of people like Benjamin Constant and Fustel de Coulanges.  But as Mogens Herman Hansen (2006:122-24) and others have shown, more recent historical studies of the polis have shown this to be incorrect.

Furthermore, new research in the social sciences over the past fifty years--particularly, in archaeology, anthropology, economic history, and classical studies--has shown that despite the uniqueness of modern liberal societies, there is a deep evolutionary history of liberal social order from antiquity to the present, and that ancient Athens is prominent in that history.  This helps to answer one of the great questions in the social sciences today: why and how did the liberal social order of today--the modern world that is unprecedented in its explosive growth in wealth and population--arise in human history?

Proponents of the "new institutional economics"--particularly, Douglass North and his colleagues--have argued that the history of social order can be explained as a history of institutional rules for solving the problem of violence and determining who has access to socially supported organizations.  As I have indicated in my post on North, Wallis, and Weingast's Violence and Social Orders (NWW), they lay out an evolutionary history of social order that moves through three stages: the foraging order, the limited access order (the natural state), and the open access order.  Through most of our evolutionary history, our prehistoric ancestors lived as hunter-gatherers in small egalitarian bands that enforced limits on violence through the personal enforcement of customary social rules.  But then once human beings settled into large agrarian societies, social hierarchies appeared with elites who lived by rent-seeking exploitation of the non-elites, and where the elite groups had to agree to abstain from violence among themselves so that they could benefit from their monopoly control of the governmentally protected social, religious, and political organizations.  Finally, over the past three hundred years, a few societies have moved into open access social orders governed by the institutional norms of rule of law, property rights, and impersonal access to economic, social, religious, and political organizations that compete freely in the open marketplaces of life.  These open access societies emerged first in England, the United States, and northwestern Europe, and then they have appeared in other parts of the world, bringing with them their historically unique growth in wealth and population.

The full transition to open access came in Great Britain, France, and the United States in the middle of the nineteenth century, when general incorporation laws allowed for the open creation of economic corporations and political organizations through impersonal laws (NWW, 190-240).  Previously, the formation of economic and political organizations had been an elite privilege; now it was open to non-elites.  Once people were free to form economic, political, and social organizations that would freely compete with one another, open access had been achieved.  "Individuals and groups may freely form organizations and enter into most economic, political, social, and other activities, subject to general rules applied impersonally, such as refraining from violence" (NWW, 117).  This is the principle of classical liberalism.  Indeed, it was at this time that the term "liberalism" came into common use to designate the idea of equal liberty in an open society.

Deirdre McCloskey has challenged this Northian evolutionary story of institutional rules.  (My most recent post on McCloskey can be found here, which includes links to earlier posts.  McCloskey has written a brief summary of her argument here for The New York Times.)  She has pointed out that most of the institutional rules that North identified as necessary for open access societies have appeared throughout human history, and therefore these institutional rules cannot explain the unique increases in wealth and population that she calls The Great Enrichment.  There are lots of examples in history--including ancient Athens--of a doubling or tripling of economic wealth per capita and of population growth over a few human generations.  Such growth has come from trading activity in markets.  And thus Polanyi is wrong in assuming that markets didn't matter in the premodern world.  But these premodern spurts of growth eventually came to an end, and so they did not produce the self-sustaining and accelerated growth of The Great Enrichment, in which liberal societies over the past two hundred years have seen average daily income increase by 1,000 to 3,000 percent. 

McCloskey argues that the cause of this Great Enrichment is not liberal institutions but liberal ideas--particularly, the idea that ordinary people pursuing their economic interests through trading in markets are equally honorable and dignified.  In other words, the bourgeois life can be virtuous.  This is what Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations called "the system of natural liberty," in which "every man, as long as he does not violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest his own way, and to bring his industry and capital into competition with those of any other man, or order of men."  This allows "every man to pursue his own interest his own way, upon the liberal plan of equality, liberty, and justice" (Liberty Fund, 664, 687).  In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith embedded this liberal system in a moral life that recognizes this as expressing the bourgeois virtues.

Until the 19th century in Great Britain, the life of trading in markets was common, but it was disdained as an ignoble or corrupting life.  And thus it was in ancient Athens, which was a commercial society: prosperity came from the entrepreneurial activity of merchants, tradesmen, and artisans, but the lives of such people were scorned as morally inferior to the lives of warriors, aristocrats, and philosophers.  The Great Enrichment was not possible until there was a change in moral and intellectual rhetoric so that the bourgeois life could be honored rather than scorned.  McCloskey's project is to support this new pro-bourgeois rhetoric by showing how the bourgeois virtues include all of the traditional virtues--the pagan virtues of courage, temperance, prudence, and wisdom, and the Christian virtues of faith, hope, and charity.

The best Northian response to McCloskey would be the argument that institutions include or depend upon ideas.  After all, as NWW indicate, successful institutions require "shared beliefs."  And so, the move to open access societies required a "transformation in thinking," because "open access societies depend for their operation on impersonal identity and the associated beliefs in equality and fairness" (NWW, 117, 192, 258, 262).  These "beliefs in equality and fairness" include the rhetoric of the bourgeois virtues that is emphasized by McCloskey.

In his recent book The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece (2015), Josiah Ober does not mention McCloskey, but he does agree with McCloskey that ancient Athens in the 5th and 4th centuries BCE was one of those premodern societies that showed an "efflorescence" (in the terminology of Jack Goldstone)--a period of increased economic growth as well as increasing population and cultural achievement promoted by a vigorous commercial life that is similar to what we see today in modern liberal societies.

Ober disagrees with McCloskey, however, in that Ober fully embraces Northian institutionalism as adequate to explain the Athenian efflorescence as well as the modern liberal social order.  And yet Ober does partially disagree with North, Wallis, and Weingast, because while NWW think that ancient Athens reached the "doorstep" of the open access society, Athens did not actually pass fully into the open access order (NWW, 134-35, 150-51); Ober and his colleagues argue that "Athens went beyond the doorstep conditions and transitioned to an open access society" (Carugati, Ober, Weingast 2015, p. 4).  By contrast, NWW would call ancient Athens a "mature limited access order."

Like McCloskey and North, Ober sees the evolution of liberalism as moving through three stages.  In the foraging bands of the Paleolithic, hunter-gatherers lived as equally free in their autonomy, because anyone who attempted dominance over others would be punished by others in the band enforcing customary norms of resistance to dominance.  (Here Ober relies on Christopher Boehm's account of "reverse-dominance hierarchies.")

Then, in the agrarian states that came with agricultural settlements, social hierarchy and exploitation of non-elites by elites arose as the prevalent form of order--"natural states" as NWW call them.  But occasionally, after the collapse of these exploitative hierarchical orders, societies could fall back into the norms of rough egalitarianism that prevailed in the prehistoric foraging societies, which showed the human capacity for decentralized cooperation, which had evolved in the foraging environments of evolutionary adaptation (Ober 2015, pp. 105, 129-31, 347, n. 13).  This is what happened in ancient Greece, after the collapse of the Late Bronze-Age-Mycenaean kingdoms (around 1177 BCE), and the Greeks moved from palace-centered regimes to citizen-centered regimes.  But even so, such citizen-centered democratic regimes were rare in the premodern world. 

It was not until the 18th and 19th centuries that liberal democratic open access regimes became prominent in the world.  Unlike the natural states, these modern open access regimes show greater adaptive flexibility, which leads to economic, social, and cultural flourishing, because such regimes are rooted in the naturally evolved human capacities for decentralized cooperation.  Through a Darwinian cultural evolution, liberal social orders have emerged as more adaptive than the alternatives.

Ober is persuasive in surveying the evidence against the common assumption of many scholars that ancient Greece was poor and experienced little or no economic growth. In fact, Greece in the classical era (the 5th and 4th centuries BCE) had rates of growth in both consumption and population that were much higher than the premodern normal and higher than any other period in Greek history until the middle of the 20th century (Ober 2015, pp. 71-100).  Ober offers a Northian institutional explanation for this: "Fair rules and competition within a marketlike ecology of states promoted capital investment, innovation, and rational cooperation in a context of low transaction costs" (103).

Similar conclusions about the ancient Greek economy have been supported by Alain Bresson (2014, 2016).  The ancient Greek economy showed some of the features of capitalist society that supported a long period of unprecedented economic growth.  The rule of law enforced property rights and contractual obligations in a way that sustained both domestic and international markets for trade.  The Greek city had two institutions for trade--the agora, or internal market, and the emporion, or market for international trade.  This trade allowed for an extensive domestic and international division of labor.  The Greek world experienced the first world economy based on long-distance trade.  Like Ober, Bresson relies on Northian institutionalism to explain this.

Although I generally agree with Ober and Bresson, I disagree at one crucial point where Ober and Bresson fail to answer the objections of McCloskey to Northian institutionalism:  Northian institutional rules cannot by themselves explain the Great Enrichment that began in the middle of the 19th century in Great Britain and the United States, because explaining this requires the emergence of liberal ideas about the bourgeois virtues that began to appear in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for the first time in history.

Ober relies on Goldstone's account of the "efflorescences" in premodern history--spurts of growth in wealth and population--that include the High Middle Ages in northwestern Europe (1150-1250), Golden Age Holland (1570-1670), High Qing China (1680-1780), Great Britain during the Industrial Revolution (1760-1830), perhaps also classical Greece (5th and 4th centuries BCE).  But Goldstone is clear that in none of these efflorenscences does one see the self-sustaining and accelerating explosion in economic growth that began in Great Britain around 1850, which McCloskey calls The Great Enrichment (Goldstone 2002, pp. 327, 329, 331-32, 334, 341, 354, 354-58).  And, indeed, even Ober concedes that the ancient Greek efflorescence and all the other efflorescences failed to achieve anything like The Great Enrichment (Ober 2015, pp. xiv-xv, 2-4, 77).  So although Northian institutionalism can explain these efflorescences of economic growth in per capita income of up to 1% per year, it cannot explain the unprecedented growth in the past two centuries, in which liberal societies have seen increases in average income from 1800 to the present of over 1,000 to 3,000 percent.  To explain that, McCloskey argues, we need to see the crucial rhetorical change that led to the great Bourgeois Revaluation that recognized the moral and intellectual virtues of the bourgeois commercial society.

But then wouldn't Strauss and the Straussians object at this point that the material economic benefits of a liberal society do not in fact promote human excellence, particularly the intellectual excellence of the philosophic life?  Must there not always be a conflict between society and philosophy that liberalism cannot resolve?  Don't we see that in the fact that even in Athens, as liberal as it was, there could be no complete toleration for philosophers, as indicated by the persecution of Socrates and other philosophers?

Ober's answer to this objection is suggested by his essay on the trial of Socrates (Ober 2011).  He points out that Socrates lived his philosophic life in Athens until his death at age 70, a life that he could not have lived in illiberal Sparta, where the freedom of thought and discussion for philosophers was impossible.  The trial and execution of Socrates in 399 BCE can be explained as an extraordinary consequence of the disorder in Athens after its defeat by Sparta in 404 BCE and the reign of the Thirty Tyrants set up by Sparta in Athens, followed by the restoration of democracy in Athens in 401.  Two of the Thirty Tyrants--Critias and Charmides--were associates of Socrates, and so Socrates was regarded with some suspicion by the supporters of the restored democracy.  A proclamation of amnesty, however, made it impossible for anyone to file legal charges against anyone suspected of supporting the tyrants.  So when Meletus brought the charge of impiety against Socrates, he was pursuing an indirect way of eliciting the citizens' suspicions of Socrates.

As indicated by the quotation above from Strauss, he saw the execution of Socrates as part of a general pattern of Athenian persecution of philosophers, including someone like Protagoras.  But, in fact, most of the stories about such persecuted philosophers in Athens are stories for which the evidence is very dubious (Dover 1976).  Strauss mentions the story about the burning of Protagoras's books and his expulsion from Athens.  But Strauss provides no source for this story.  And he is silent about the claim of Socrates that Protagoras enjoyed a high reputation in Athens throughout his life (Plato, Meno, 91e).

Ober notes that Athens allowed philosophical schools (like those of Plato and Aristotle) to organize themselves as voluntary associations in which philosophers could pursue the philosophic life in friendship with others, and thus the open access order of Athens applied to ideas as well as market exchanges (Carugati, Ober, and Weingast 2015).  Here Ober is relying on a dissertation by one of his graduate students on freedom for associations in classical Athens (Kierstead 2013), which builds upon the work of Nicholas Jones (1999).

Even Plato in The Republic recognizes that democracy is the only regime that secures the freedom that allows people like Socrates to study philosophy, and thus "anyone by nature free regards this city alone as a fit place to live" (558c-62a).  Some readers of The Republic (like Will Altman) have seen this as Plato's endorsement of liberal democracy.

As I have indicated in some earlier posts (here and here), this shows the Aristotelian liberalism of philosophic friendship in a free society that Adam Smith and David Hume saw as emerging in the modern commercial society of Scotland in the 18th century.


REFERENCES

Bresson, Alain. 2014. "Capitalism and the Ancient Greek Economy." In The Cambridge History of Capitalism, vol. 1: The Rise of Capitalism: From Ancient Origins to 1848, eds. Larry Neal and Jeffrey G. Williamson, pp. 43-74. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bresson, Alain. 2016. The Making of the Ancient Greek Economy: Institutions, Markets, and Growth in the City-States. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Carugati, Federica, Josiah Ober, and Barry R. Weingast. 2015. "Is Development Uniquely Modern? Athens on the Doorstep." Working paper. Stanford, CA: Stanford University.

Dover, Kenneth. 1976. "The Freedom of the Intellectual in Greek Society." Talanta 7: 24-54.

Goldstone, Jack A. 2002. "Efflorescences and Economic Growth in World History: Rethinking the 'Rise of the West' and the Industrial Revolution." Journal of World History 13: 323-389.

Hansen, Mogens Herman. 2006. Polis: An Introduction to the Ancient Greek City-State. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Jones, Nicholas F. 1999. The Associations of Classical Athens: The Response to Democracy. New York: Oxford University Press.

Kierstead, James. 2013. "A Community of Communities: Associations and Democracy in Classical Athens." A Doctoral Dissertation for the Department of Classics, Stanford University.

Ober, Josiah. 2011. "Socrates and Democratic Athens," In Donald R. Morrison, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Socrates, 138-78.

Ober, Josiah. 2015. The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Part 3 of "The Evolution of Human Progress Through the Liberal Enlightenment"

5. WHAT IS THE ULTIMATE CAUSE OF HUMAN PROGRESS?

Readers of Bailey and Tupy's book can see suggestions about four possible causes of human progress.  Two are explicitly stated by them--inclusive institutions and bourgeois ideas.  Two others are implied--the military success of liberal regimes and the evolved natural desire for freedom.  All four causes jointly contribute to the convergent evolution of liberal free-market democracies as the best social order.

Inclusive institutions.  At the beginning of their book (3), Bailey and Tupy embrace the argument of Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson in their 2012 book--Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty--which turns on the contrast between "inclusive institutions" and "extractive institutions."  Acemoglu and Robinson have adopted the institutionalist theory of Douglass North and his colleagues in Violence and Social Orders (2009).  And the contrast between inclusive and extractive institutions corresponds to the contrast made by North and his colleagues between "open access societies" and "limited access societies."  (I have written about Violence and Social Orders here.)

Since the Neolithic Agricultural Revolution and the establishment of bureaucratic states, most societies have had extractive institutions through which a few ruling elites extract resources from the multitude of people excluded from power.  Only in the last 300 years, have a few societies--beginning in Great Britain and in North America--developed inclusive economic and political institutions that distribute economic and political power widely.  Inclusive institutions such as property rights, the rule of law, free markets, and political freedom create incentives for innovation through evolution by "creative destruction"--economic and political entrepreneurs who innovate in profitable ways succeed, and those who do not fail.  These inclusive institutions have created the conditions for all the great improvements in human well-being--the progressive global trends--that Bailey and Tupy present in their book.

According to Acemoglu and Robinson, the Glorious Revolution of 1688 in Great Britain created the world's first inclusive institutions, which became the turning point in human history towards modern liberal social orders.  In the Glorious Revolution, King James II was forced off the throne by the Whig revolutionaries, who then invited William and Mary to take the throne under the condition that they accept Parliament's Declaration of Rights, which ended divine right monarchy and established the supremacy of Parliament as representing a broad coalition of economic and political groups.  This liberal Whig movement was supported by a coalition of merchants, industrialists, the gentry, and diverse political groups.  New merchants and businessmen wanted free markets that allowed for innovative creative destruction in ways that would benefit them.  Eventually, this led to the Industrial Revolution, beginning in the 18th century, and then to the Great Enrichment, beginning in the 19th century.

North and his colleagues emphasize the importance for the new open access orders of the general laws of incorporation enacted in Great Britain and the United States in the 1840s and 1850s.  These laws allowed citizens to form corporations with legally stipulated rights and duties through procedures for registration and minimal conditions impersonally applied.  What previously was an elite privilege was openly available based on impersonal standards for registration as a corporation.  This created open entry to forming economic, social, and political organizations that were free to compete with one another.

In this way, inclusive or open access institutions allow creative political, economic, and social destruction through competition, in which successful enterprises proliferate and failed enterprises are eliminated.  Society secures open access to organizations as vehicles for political, economic, and social entrepreneurs to compete in implementing their ideas.  Such free competition in social experimentation allows a social order to achieve adaptive efficiency in responding to new and unpredictable challenges.

Bourgeois ideas.  Even if Acemoglu, Robinson, and North are right about the importance of inclusive or open access institutions as the necessary conditions for the modern liberal social order, we might still wonder whether Deirdre McCloskey is right in arguing that this is not sufficient to explain the uniqueness of the Great Enrichment, which required an intellectual change in ideas.  The triumph of liberalism required a rhetorical change in moral ideas so that a bourgeois way of life--a commercial way of life--could be seen as virtuous.  Bailey and Tupy apparently accept this point when they endorse McCloskey's point about the need for "major ideological shifts" (3-4).

In their account of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 as initiating the turn to inclusive institutions, Acemoglu and Robinson rely on Steven Pincus' history--1688: The First Modern Revolution--which argues that this political revolution was a revolutionary transformation that prepared the way for the Industrial Revolution.  But Acemoglu and Robinson ignore Pincus' stress on the importance of the Whig ideas of John Locke and other writers in driving the revolutionary resistance to the Stuart monarchy and in shaping the Glorious Revolution into a modern revolution that established a "bourgeois culture."  What McCloskey identifies as bourgeois ideas are actually the Lockean ideas of natural human liberty and equality--the moral ideas that constitute and sustain the inclusive institutions that have promoted modern human progress.  (I have written about this here and here.)

Might makes right.  Because of his involvement in conspiracies for violent revolution, Locke was forced to flee to Holland to avoid being beheaded by the King, like Algernon Sydney and other radical Whig theorists.  Locke saw appeals to natural right as ultimately appeals to the force of arms--the "appeal to Heaven"--so that disagreements over right are settled by conspiratorial violence and military conflict.  Contrary to the common belief that the Glorious Revolution was a bloodless revolution, there were many violent clashes in the revolution; and the revolution would have failed if the military forces of James II had defeated the military forces of William II.

Acemoglu and Robinson recognize this point, and they note that even as late as 1746 the revolution could have been overturned by the Jacobite rising if the army of Charles Edward Stuart had not been defeated at the battle of Culloden in Scotland.  This shows, they observe, that the history of inclusive institutions has often been decided by the contingencies of warfare.

Bailey and Tupy also seem to recognize this when they note that "confrontations between extractive and inclusive regimes, such as World War II and the Cold War, have generally been won by the latter," because "liberal free-market democracies are resilient in ways that enable them to forestall or rise above the kinds of shocks that destroy brittle extractive regimes" (4).  Do they mean to suggest here that liberal regimes will always prevail in military conflicts with illiberal regimes?  If Hitler had not committed the blunder of attacking the Soviet Union in June of 1941, which forced the German armies to fight on two fronts--western and eastern--is it possible that Nazi Germany might have won the war and thus turned the tide of history towards illiberal regimes?

Or can the assertion of natural rights in Lockean liberalism be grounded in the natural human propensity to forceful resistance to oppression and tyranny, so that it really is true that might makes right?  (I have written about this here, here, and here.)

The evolved natural desire for freedom.  If inclusive institutions have caused the global human progress surveyed by Bailey and Tupy, and if "inclusive institutions are similar to one another in their respect for individual liberty" (3), then the ultimate cause of this progress would seem to be liberty.  That this is so can be confirmed by the fact that the "Human Freedom Index" correlates with all of the progressive trends towards increasing human well-being: the free societies tend to be the societies were human life is flourishing.  (I have written about the "Human Freedom Index" here.)

The universal appeal of freedom is perhaps most clearly manifested in what Francis Fukuyama in 1989 called "the end of history."  History as the human search for the fully satisfying social order has come to an end, he suggested, because with the defeat of fascism and Nazism in World War II and the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989, liberal democracy remains with no serious challenger, and most of the people in the world today agree in principle that liberal democracy is the final form of government.  Bailey and Tupy see this as Trend 8--"Democracy on the March."  The proportion of countries with autocratic governments has declined, while the proportion with democratic governments has risen.

One possible explanation for this is offered by Spinoza in The Theological-Political Treatise, perhaps the first full defense of modern liberal democracy.  He declared that the democratic state is "the most natural state," because it approaches most nearly the equal liberty of human beings in the state of nature.

Darwinian evolutionary psychology can confirm this by showing that the social life of our hunter-gatherer ancestors manifests the individual liberty and equality that liberal theorists have attributed to the state of nature.  And therefore the liberal conception of government as instituted among men to secure the individual rights that first arose in the state of nature might indeed be "the most natural state."

Foragers assert their individual autonomy and liberty in resisting the attempts of anyone to establish dominance over them.  So the liberal ideas of equal liberty and dignity for all individuals and resistance to the sort of dominance hierarchies established in agrarian states (with extractive or limited access institutions) can be understood as appealing to the original liberalism of the state of nature.

This kind of Darwinian liberal thinking is suggested in the writings of people like Alexandra Maryanski, Jonathan Turner, Paul Rubin, Christopher Boehm, and Christian Welzel.

West on the American Founding (4): Character Formation in Voluntary Associations without Governmental Coercion

I have argued that Martin Diamond's Midwest Straussian interpretation of the American founding is superior to Tom West's interpretation, because Diamond rightly saw that the founders recognized that the virtuous character of the people was best formed by civil society--by families and voluntary associations in private life--without legal coercion by government.  In a liberal regime like that favored by the founders, the purpose of government is liberty, while the purpose of society is virtue.

Throughout much of his book, West rejects this separation of government as promoting liberty and society as promoting virtue, because he argues "that according to the founders, virtue is necessary for freedom, and that government cannot rely solely on private institutions such as families and churches to sustain it" (270).  "Enforcement of moral law," he insists, is "the purpose of government" (177-81).  In some parts of his book, however, West seems to agree with Diamond that the founders thought the purpose of government was liberty rather than virtue, and that the cultivation of virtue was the concern of private society (405-10).

The importance of voluntary associations in forming the moral, religious, and intellectual character of Americans was noticed by Alexis de Tocqueville in the 1830s, and recently scholars like Kevin Butterfield--in The Making of Tocqueville's America: Law and Association in the Early United States (2015)--have written the history of this.  Butterfield shows how these voluntary associations were extensions into private society of the social compact theory of government: people organized themselves into societies by writing and consenting to constitutions that became the supreme law for securing the ends that they wanted to promote. 

As one of many examples of what he calls "everyday constitutionalism," Butterfield tells the story of the Ladies Literary Society of Norwich, Connecticut that was founded in 1800 when a small group of women wrote a constitution declaring: "we the undersigned do agree to form ourselves into a Society, by the name of the Ladies Literary Society for the special purpose of Enlightening our understandings, expanding our Ideas, and promoting useful knowledge among our Sex; to this end we propose we assemble ev'ry other Wednesday eve, or ev'ry Wednesday from the first of October, to the first of March from 7 Oclock till 9" (93-94).  Following this same pattern of constitutional founding, associations were established for every conceivable social purpose--including moral and religious reform, as in the temperance societies and the anti-slavery societies.

West cites Butterfield's book with approval (West, 255).  But West is silent about Butterfield's emphasis on the "voluntary principle" in these associations, which denied the need or the right of government to coercively enforce morality or religion.  For example, West defends the establishment of religion by state governments as a necessary way for government to promote religion.  But Butterfield argues that the disestablishment of religion in the states after the Revolution--with Massachusetts in 1833 being the last state to terminate its state religious establishment--showed the trend toward "fully voluntary religious societies."  And as a consequence of this, church membership increased dramatically in the first half of the 19th century, which demonstrated that religious belief was promoted by a total separation of church and state (Butterfield, 29-37).  This vindicated Roger Williams' argument for a "wall of separation" between "civil" matters supervised by government and "spiritual" matters left to the conscience of private individuals.

What one sees here in these voluntary associations--churches, schools, clubs, moral reform societies, business firms, mutual aid societies, and utopian communities--is what we might call "private lawmaking" or "private governance," which has been the subject of a previous post (here).  We could also see this as showing what is required in what Douglass North and his colleagues have called the "open access" society (the subject of a post here).

Steven Pinker and The Evolutionary Decline of Violence

I am reading Steven Pinker's new book--The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.  This will be the first of a series of posts on questions raised by the book.


The cover of this book has a beautiful reproduction of Rembrandt's painting of "The Angel Stopping Abraham from Sacrificing Isaac to God," which is based on the famous story of Abraham's faith being tested by God's command to sacrifice his son to God (Genesis 22:10-12).  This is a vivid way to capture the argument of the book.  Isaac is bound on top of a stack of wood.  One of Abraham's hands forcefully holds down Isaac's head.  The other hand has held a knife and is thrusting towards Isaac's chest.  But the angel has grabbed his wrist so that the knife falls from his hand.  (Oddly, the book jacket reproduction is actually a mirror image of the original painting, so that Abraham is stabbing with his left hand rather than his right hand.)


The painting is a compelling depiction of the disturbing questions raised by the story.  Abraham is vigorously executing God's command to murder Isaac, which shows his faith.  But the angel's intervention suggests that God knows that this is wrong.  And yet, we wonder, if God knows it's wrong, why did he command it?  Are we being taught that there is no natural standard of right and wrong, because whatever God commands is right?  Should we infer from this that, as Kierkegaard argued, this story shows that total faith requires a "suspension of the ethical"?


From Pinker's perspective, what this really shows is the tension between the "better angels of our nature"--as Abraham Lincoln called them--that favor peaceful cooperation and the "inner demons" that move us to violent conflict.  The tension is not within God's will, but within human nature.  Unfortunately, Pinker suggests, the belief that one is executing God's will can release the inner demons of human nature and suppress the better angels.   


We can see this in Thomas Aquinas's writings.  Thomas justifies Abraham's binding of Isaac by arguing that it cannot be wrong for God to command us to kill an innocent person, because God's command can never be wrong (ST, I-II, q. 100, a. 8, ad 3; II-II, q. 64, a. 6, ad 3; q. 104, a. 4, ad 2).  And yet Thomas indicates the contradiction here between natural reason and supernatural revelation when he observes: "Abraham did not sin in being willing to slay his innocent son, because he obeyed God, although considered in itself it was contrary to right human reason" (ST, II-II, q. 154, a. 2, ad 2). 

Similarly, Thomas justifies the violence of the Inquisition by insisting that any Christian who disagrees with even one article of faith as set down by the authority of the Catholic Church, residing primarily in the Pope, can be rightly "exterminated from the world by death" (ST, II-II, q. 5, a. 3; q. 11, aa. 1-2). 

The peak of Christian sadism comes when Thomas teaches that part of the blessedness of Heaven will be that the saved will be able to look down into Hell and rejoice at the eternal torment of the damned (ST, suppl., q. 94, aa. 1-3).

And yet, Thomas shows another side of his teaching when he argues that it does not belong to human law to punish all vices.  "Human law is established for the collectivity of human beings, most of whom have imperfect virtue.  And so human law does not prohibit every kind of vice, from which the virtuous abstain.  Rather, human law prohibits only the more serious kinds of vice, from which most persons can abstain, and especially those vices that inflict harm on others, without the prohibition of which human society could not be preserved.  For example, human laws prohibit murders, thefts, and the like" (ST, I-II, q. 96, a. 3).  Here Thomas points to the central principle of liberal jurisprudence--that the primary aim of law is not to force people to be perfectly virtuous but to prohibit any conduct that inflicts harm on others, and particularly violent harm.

Pinker's book is about the history of the great transformation in human life by which we have moved from the violent conflict of Thomas's medieval world to the peaceful cooperation of the modern world.  Pinker's history is a story of six trends, five inner demons, four better angels, and five historical forces.

SIX TRENDS
The first trend in the decline of violence was the Pacification Process, by which agricultural civilizations used governmental institutions and formal laws to reduce the violence of raiding and feuding endemic to the state of nature of foraging and horticultural societies.

The second trend was the Civilizing Process, by which centralized authority and commercial society in early modern Europe reduced the violence and brutality characteristic of the Middle Ages.

The third trend was the Humanitarian Revolution, beginning in the 17th and 18th centuries, by which the European Enlightenment reduced socially sanctioned forms of violence such as slavery and torture.

The fourth trend was the Long Peace, after World War II, the longest period in history in which the great powers have not fought wars with one another.

The fifth trend is the New Peace, since the end of the Cold War in 1989, in which all kinds of organized conflicts have declined.

Finally, the sixth trend, beginning with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, is the Rights Revolution, by which human beings have shown increasing disgust towards violence directed at persecuted groups, such as ethnic minorities, women, children, and homosexuals.

Much of Pinker's argumentation for these six trends depends on marshaling the quantitative data showing the decline in violence.  The absolute level of deaths by homicide in the modern world--as, for example, in the two world wars--can be very high, and that makes us think that the modern world is much more violent than the premodern world.  But Pinker shows that when we look at the level of homicidal violence in proportion to the human population, we can see that the per capita rate of homicide has dropped dramatically across human history.

To understand the causes of violence, we must understand the "five inner demons" of human nature.

FIVE INNER DEMONS
To understand the psychology of violence, Pinker argues, we must understand the complex interaction between many environmental, social, and neurobiological factors.

The first inner demon is instrumental violence, or violence employed as a practical means to any end.

The second inner demon is dominance, or violence employed to gain power or glory in contests over prestige.

The third inner demon is revenge, or violence employed by a moralistic desire for retributive punishment.

The fourth inner demon is sadism, or violence employed because of one's pleasure in the suffering of others.

The fifth inner demon is ideology, or violence employed as a means to achieve some utopian vision of human perfection grounded in a shared utopian belief system.

These five inner demons are countered by four better angels.

FOUR BETTER ANGELS
The first better angel is empathy, or a sympathetic concern for the pains and pleasures of others.

The second better angel is self-control, or the habituated ability to inhibit our impulses based on our anticipation of the bad consequences of impulsive behavior.

The third better angel is the moral sense, or the social norms governing conduct that can sometimes reduce violence, but which can also increase violence towards those outside of one's group.

The fourth better angel is reason, or the capacity of deliberate judgment by which we see ourselves as others see us, by which we expand our moral concern to ever wider circles of humanity, and by which we can plan how to use the other better angels of our nature to improve our social life.

The success of these better angels in promoting peaceful cooperation and reducing violent conflict depends on five historical forces.

FIVE HISTORICAL FORCES
The first historical force is the Leviathan, or the legal and governmental institutions that mediate conflict in ways that reduce the disorder that comes from the selfish impulses that incline us to exploitation and vengeance.

The second historical force is commerce, or the exchange of goods and ideas over ever longer distances and ever larger groups of people, so that we see people as valuable trading partners, and consequently we are less inclined to attack them.

The third historical force is feminization, or the process by which the increasing status and influence of women has promoted feminine caregiving as a check on male violence.

The fourth historical force is cosmopolitanism, or the globalization of human culture by which an increasing number of people expand their circle of sympathetic concern.

The fifth historical force is the escalator of reason, or the growing application of human rationality to recognizing how violence becomes self-defeating and how peaceful cooperation with an ever expanding circle of trading partners becomes beneficial for all.

There is much here that deserves comment.  But my first thought is that Pinker's book confirms and deepens much of what I have written about deep history, coevolutionary history, and Darwinian liberalism.

DARWINIAN LIBERALISM
When Thomas Huxley in 1860 proclaimed that Darwin's Origin of Species would become a powerful weapon for liberalism, he anticipated how evolutionary science would eventually explain the emergence of modern liberal social thought as the culmination of the deep evolutionary history of humanity.  Pinker's book can now be added to a collection of recent books--including Douglass North, John J. Wallis, and Barry Weingast, Violence and Social Orders (2009), and Matt Ridley's The Rational Optimist (2010)--that survey the recent research on human evolution as a history of liberalism.

Every human society throughout history has faced the problem of violence.  No society can solve this problem by eliminating violence completely, because the tendency to violence is too deeply rooted in human nature and the human condition.  But violence can be contained and managed, and the different kinds of social order can be distinguished by how they do that and by how well they do it.  The modern liberal society can be recognized as the best society because it contains and manages violence more successfully than any other social order.

North, Wallis, and Weingast distinguish three broad kinds of social order: the foraging order of hunter-gatherers, the agrarian order of states based on agricultural production, and the open access societies that have arisen only in the last few centuries.  In the foraging order, social norms are enforced by vengeance and vigilante justice, so that violence is checked by retaliation.  But in the absence of impartial judges and formal law, foraging societies tend to fall into a violent state of nature caught in cycles of feuding and raiding. 

Hobbes and Locke saw the need for pacifying this conflict through formal laws and government that came with the establishment of agricultural communities and the invention of writing.  But Locke also saw the tendency to despotic violence in agrarian states and thus the need for limited government and the protection of liberty.

The open access order of liberal capitalist republics constrains and manages conflict through free competition and cooperation.  An open polity provides free access to political organizations.  An open economy provides free access to economic organizations.  And an open society provides free access to ideas and culture.

As liberal capitalist republicanism has spread around the world and as the liberal regimes are bound together in global networks of open political, economic, and cultural exchange, violence has been reduced to the lowest levels of human history.

The liberal success in constraining and managing violence promotes the political good of liberty, the economic good of prosperity, and the cultural goods of moral and intellectual excellence.

Some posts on related themes can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

A Thousand Posts (8)

2016
I have often argued for the evolution of a Darwinian liberalism that was first expressed by John Locke and Adam Smith, although there are precursors in the liberal thinkers of ancient Athens and in Lucretius of ancient Rome.  But it might be objected that the English word "liberalism" as a term for a political position did not appear until the 1820s in England.

In January, I wrote a post on the evolutionary origins of the word "liberalism."  The use of the adjective "liberal" in its political sense derived from Adam Smith's language in The Wealth of Nations, where Smith identified "the liberal system of free exportation and free importation," and where he spoke of "allowing every man to pursue his own interest his own way, upon the liberal plan of equality, liberty, and justice."  Smith's description of the "liberal system" suggests that it coincides with what he calls the "system of natural liberty," because in both cases, he speaks of a man's freedom "to pursue his own interest his own way." 

Later, in Great Britain, the English noun "liberalism" was coined to refer to this Smithian understanding of "liberal" thought.  The earliest use of "liberalism" that I have noticed is by Alexander von Humboldt in a letter to Thomas Jefferson on May 24, 1804, in which Humboldt writes: "Your writings, your actions, and the liberalism of your ideas have inspired me from my earliest youth."

Although Smith does not use the word "evolution," his account of the "liberal system" does have an evolutionary character to it.  Hayek noticed this and developed it in his account of the liberal idea of "spontaneous evolution" or "spontaneous order."  Smith's system of natural liberty is a spontaneous order that evolves from the bottom-up rather than being designed from the top-down.  It is a natural evolutionary order in that it arises from the natural desire of all individuals to better their condition, which leads to wealth and prosperity whenever the laws secure to individuals the liberty to enjoy the fruits of their own labor.

In the nineteenth century, Herbert Spencer elaborated the principle of equal liberty as fundamental for liberalism, and he presented it as part of a cosmic evolution of order in which the whole history of the Universe could be seen as an evolution from simplicity to complexity.  Modern evolutionary classical liberalism is rooted in the tradition of Spencer, and the recent work of those like Matt Ridley, Jonathan Haidt, and Steven Pinker confirms Spencer's rational optimism about the evolutionary progressive trend across history towards increasing liberty and declining violence (see my post in March 2014).

In August, I wrote posts on Deirdre McCloskey's argument--elaborated in three books--that modern classical liberalism first arose as part of the "Bourgeois Revaluation" that elevated the "bourgeois virtues."  She embraces an evolutionary theory of bourgeois liberalism that is similar to the evolutionary account of liberalism that has been defended by Jonathan Turner, Alexandra Maryanski, Paul Rubin, and me (in various writings as well as on this blog).

The basic idea, as McCloskey says, is that bourgeois liberalism is "reinstating a pre-agricultural equality" by establishing an equal dignity and liberty for ordinary people--including an "equality of genuine comfort"--that restores the equal autonomy of individuals enjoyed in hunter-gatherer bands for hundreds of thousands of years until the establishment of rigid class hierarchies in agrarian societies. 

As I have argued in some earlier posts, this is a restatement of Locke's argument for liberalism as the restoration of the natural liberty and equality that hunter-gatherers had in the "state of nature."  Locke's account of the state of nature depended on the reports of Europeans about the foraging life of native Americans.  "In the beginning," Locke declared, "all the world was America."  Now, after two centuries of scientific studies of the foraging way of life, we can confirm Locke's account of the state of nature as mostly right.  And we can see that the modern liberal ideas of equality, liberty, and dignity can be understood as appealing to that evolved human nature as shaped in the hunter-gatherer bands of our evolutionary ancestors.

And yet, one might object that, as Hayek claimed in his evolutionary account of liberalism, the liberalism of the Great Society--of the extended order of exchange in which millions of people can cooperate anonymously for their mutual benefit--requires a repression of the natural instincts shaped by life in ancient families and small bands.

But, as I have argued in many posts, Hayek is mistaken in his belief that our hunter-gatherer ancestors lived in a completely socialist or collectivist order with no individual autonomy, and therefore our evolved human nature must be suppressed if we are to live in a free society of autonomous individuals who trade with one another for mutual benefit.  In fact, as McCloskey indicates, there is plenty of evidence for long-distance trading networks among our ancient foraging ancestors.  Even Hayek himself sometimes concedes that there is evidence for ancient trading. 

In October, I wrote a post on some speeches on "Socialism and Human Nature" at the Cato Institute by Leda Cosmides, John Tooby, and Jonathan Haidt.  They indicated that Hayek was partly right in that socialist sharing within families and small bands was one of the evolved instinctive rules of cooperation for foragers, but he was partly wrong in failing to see how the evolved instinctive rules of social exchange and resistance to oppressive dominance could be evoked by modern liberal culture.

Haidt declared: "We evolved to do tribalism and trade."  Living within families and small groups, we are collectivists in evoking the social instincts of our foraging mind.  But in the extended order of markets, we are traders in evoking the foraging instincts for social exchange.  The expansion of trading networks over the past five thousand years and the explosive expansion over the past two hundred years have been cultural extensions of the innate propensities for trade.

We are also libertarians in evoking "liberty/oppression" as one of the moral foundations of our evolved human nature, Haidt argued.  Here he appealed to Christopher Boehm's account of how foragers protect their autonomy as free individuals by resistance to the dominance behavior of those who might become bullies or tyrants.  If this is part of our evolved human nature, as Boehm claims, then this would show how Smith's "system of natural liberty" could be rooted in our innate instincts. If this is so, then the bourgeois liberal ideas of equal liberty and dignity for all individuals and resistance to the sort of dominance hierarchies established in agrarian states can be understood as appealing to the original liberalism of the state of nature.

Some anthropologists have objected to looking at hunter-gatherers as models of evolved human nature.  Surely, there is so much variability in the lives of the foraging bands of the past 200 years studied by anthropologists that we cannot generalize about them.  Nor can we assume that their lives are the same as the lives of our ancient prehistoric foraging ancestors.  That's the argument of Robert Kelly in The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers, which was the subject of a post in September.

And yet, far from denying human nature, Kelly's book is actually organized around an implicit theory of human nature that is evident in the topics of chapters 3-9 of the book: (3) Foraging and Subsistence, (4) Mobility, (5) Technology, (6) Sharing, Exchange, and Land Tenure, (7) Group Size and Demography, (8) Men, Women, and Foraging, (9) Nonegalitarian Hunting-Gatherers.  Why does he assume that these are the most important topics?  Because they are natural human desires or needs that any human society must satisfy in some manner?  If so, then why can't we judge liberal societies by how well they satisfy those natural desires? 

One of the best surveys of the evidence for these natural desires as grounded in evolved human nature is Stephen Sanderson's Human Nature and the Evolution of Society.  In April and May, I wrote a series of posts on Sanderson's book showing the ways in which he supports my argument for the meaning and purpose of life in 20 natural desires. In particular, Sanderson suggests that capitalist social orders might satisfy the naturally evolved propensities for reciprocal exchange; and he cites Cosmides and Tooby as supporting this in a way that suggests that even they see capitalist social orders as satisfying some evolved propensities of human nature.

Sanderson has suggested that my list of twenty natural desires should be altered to include the natural desire for ethnic identity.  I am not persuaded by his argument, which he derives from Pierre van den Berghe and Frank Salter, that ethnic affiliation is an evolutionary adaptation, in that those who favor their ethnic community over others are practicing an extended form of kin selection that advances their ethnic genetic interests.  Some of the alt-right supporters of Trump have criticized me for not recognizing the evolved natural desire for ethnic genetic identity.

I am persuaded that evolved human nature is inclined to tribal thinking, so that we naturally categorize people as us and them, and we naturally favor our group over others.  And while the social conditions of life have often predisposed people to make this in-group/out-group division along racial and ethnic lines, there is no evidence that this predisposition is an innate adaptation of the human mind. 

On the contrary, there is lots of evidence that while we are innately inclined to look for cues of coalitional affiliation, the content of those cues depends on social learning; and people in multi-racial and multi-ethnic societies can be taught to be cooperative without regard for racial or ethnic boundaries.  In fact, Frank Salter implicitly concedes the truth of this point when he laments that ethnic nepotism is not instinctive, and therefore serving ethnic genetic interests requires artificial cultural strategies devised by modern scientific reasoning, and that no ethnic state has ever succeeded in securing an adaptive ethnic group strategy.  I wrote a post on this in May.

A closely related issue is whether evolutionary psychology can explain the demographic transition (rising wealth linked to declining birth rates).  I see the demographic transition as a natural expression of the prudent flexibility of human beings in adapting their parental desires to changing ecological circumstances.  Because of the natural variability in human temperament, some human beings will choose to be childless.  But most human beings in all societies will have a strong natural desire to care for children.  In the socioeconomic circumstances of modern industrialized and technologically advanced societies, parents will want to have small families, so that they can invest resources in their own education, in their careers, and in the education of a few children, and so that those children can become socially successful adults.  Most parents will desire to have no more than two or three children, and where mortality rates are low, this will be enough to sustain current population levels.  I wrote a post on this in March.

In a liberal society, much of our economic life is organized through social exchange in markets that arise as spontaneous orders without central planning.  But in a small family, the parents can have sufficient knowledge of the needs and capacities of their children and sufficient incentives to care properly for their children, so that parents can deliberately plan the organization of their family to achieve the shared ends of the family.  This explains why abolishing the family is impossible: without the family organized around parental care of children, it's unlikely that anyone would have the knowledge and incentives to do as well as parents do in caring for their children.  So while Hayek believes that spontaneous order is the best way to manage an economy, he also believes that deliberate organization is the best way to manage a family. 

Steven Horwitz has written a book about the importance of family life for a Hayekian classical liberalism.  I wrote a post on Horwitz's book in October.

Horwitz shows how in modern life in liberal societies, we must live in two different worlds with different rules.  On the one hand, we live in families and other organizations (like firms and community groups) based on intimate, face-to-face relationships of moral concern for one another.  On the other hand, we live in the extended order of anonymous exchange in complex market economies based on impersonal rules. 

Socialists have argued that our social world would be more just if it were organized like a large family, so that everyone treated one another as brothers and sisters.  But Hayek insisted that this attempt to turn the spontaneous order of the market into the deliberate organization of a family must fail in ways that will destroy the extended order of impersonal exchange that makes modern economic life possible.

The success of a liberal social order depends on the socialization of children in the family so that they learn the social norms and habits of a liberal society, in which people must live in two worlds at once, without applying the rules of one world to the other.  Children must learn the bourgeois virtues necessary for living in a bourgeois liberal society.

With the full expression of bourgeois society in Europe and North America in the 19th century, many bohemian artists and intellectuals reacted with bitter scorn for the bourgeois life.  Gustave Flaubert, for example, showed us how Emma Bovary was forced to have two adulterous affairs and then commit suicide as a heroic protest against the bourgeois mediocrity of her husband Charles.  In a letter to George Sand, Flaubert proclaimed: "Axiom: Hatred of the Bourgeois is the beginning of all virtue."

Steven Smith quotes this in his chapter on Madame Bovary in his new book Modernity and Its Discontents: Making and Unmaking the Bourgeois from Machiavelli to Bellow. I wrote posts on Smith's book in September.  Smith is a Straussian, and the influence of Leo Strauss permeates his book, including a chapter on Strauss.  According to Smith, Strauss "fulfills the office of the philosopher to the highest degree."

Like most Straussians, Smith scorns bourgeois liberalism because, they insist, it lacks the human excellence, the heroic nobility, and the transcendent longings of life in the premodern world.  As is characteristic of the Straussians, Smith presents his argument through textual interpretations of some books.  As is also characteristic of the Straussians, he almost never looks at any of the empirical evidence that might sustain or deny the claims of the authors he interprets.  He ignores the empirical evidence surveyed by Steven Pinker, Deirdre McCloskey, and others that shows the economic, moral, and intellectual progress achieved in bourgeois societies.

Smith also ignores the fact that even his own account of Ben Franklin as the American model of the bourgeois man contradicts the claims of the antibourgeois writers.  Smith is silent about how McCloskey can look to Franklin as displaying the bourgeois virtues.

Human nature sets the standard for the human good.  By nature the generic goods characterize the human species.  By nature the individualized goods characterize human individuals. The virtue of prudence is required for judging what is best for each individual because of the uniqueness of each individual.

Actually, all animals show individual diversity in their personalities, and thus animal biologists must study the unique personalities of animals in their life history.  As is the case for human beings, we must study not only the generic nature of each animal species and the cultural history of each animal group, but also the individual history of each animal.  A biopolitical science of political animals must move at all three levels.  I wrote a post on this in June.

A bourgeois liberal society conforms best to human nature, because a liberal open society will secure both natural liberty and natural virtue--the liberty of individuals to develop those moral and intellectual virtues that express that ranking of the generic goods of human nature that constitutes the best life for those individuals.  In such a free society, someone like Strauss, who "fulfills the office of philosopher to the highest degree," will be free to live the philosophic life in friendship with other philosophers; and the rest of us will be free to live other kinds of life that best conform to our individual propensities and talents.

Smith concludes his book by declaring that "the narrative of progress is no longer sustainable."  He believes this is true because antibourgeois intellectuals have said that it is true.  He never reflects on the fact that this contradicts the reality of the life that most of us live today in bourgeois liberal societies.  Because of market freedom, cultural pluralism, and the bourgeois virtues, our life today is generally more peaceful, more just, and richer in both material and spiritual goods than has ever been the case for human beings at any previous time in history.  Does Smith really believe that that is not progress?

In November and December, I wrote a series of posts surveying the empirical evidence of global human progress due to the influence of bourgeois liberal ideas and institutions.  Human life today is better than it has ever been in human history, because we enjoy the benefits of two centuries of human progress through the Liberal Enlightenment.  Our time is the best of all times that human beings have ever known.

And yet most human beings around the world deny this.  In surveys asking people whether the world is getting better, most people (94% in the United States, 96% in Great Britain and Germany) say no.  Many of those Americans who believe everything is getting worse voted for Donald Trump, because he appealed to their fear that America and the whole world are in decline, and because he persuaded them that only the leadership of a strongman can save them.

This popular pessimism is contradicted by empirical data that shows more human progress in the past two hundred years than at any time in previous human history.  The Earth today sustains more human lives (over 7 billion) than ever before in history.  Moreover, those lives on average are longer and healthier than has ever been the case.  Life is also more peaceful.  Life shows more equality of opportunity.  Life also shows more freedom--both economic freedom and personal freedom.  Prior to 1800, almost all human beings lived in grinding poverty and mind-numbing ignorance.  Today, only a very few people around the world live in absolute poverty, and most people are literate and have been educated far beyond the level attained by most people in history.  Data collected by various international organizations provides empirical evidence for all of these claims about human progress from the Liberal Enlightenment.

Smith and other Straussians would probably respond to this by arguing that this ignores what they like to call "the problem of the bourgeois":  bourgeois liberalism does improve the material conditions of life for almost everyone--life is healthier, wealthier, and freer--but it does not satisfy the human soul's transcendent longings for heroic excellence, particularly the intellectual excellence of the philosophic life.

But this seems hardly plausible if one notices how a proponent of bourgeois liberalism like Adam Smith defends the "wise and virtuous man" as the standard of moral and intellectual perfection as manifested in the life of philosophic friends. (See my posts in August and September of 2016 and August of 2012.)  He observes that the division of labor in a commercial society allows for the intellectual commerce of philosophers "whose trade it is, not to do anything, but to observe everything."  He presents the life of David Hume as showing how a commercial society provides the conditions for the philosophic life--a life that in Hume's case approached "as nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man, as perhaps the nature of human frailty will permit."

This language echoes the end of Plato's Phaedo.  Describing the death of Socrates, Phaedo observes: "Such was the end of our friend, who was, as we may say, of all those of his time whom we have known, the best and wisest and most just man."  Thus, Smith is suggesting that Hume shows how a Socratic life of philosophic inquiry is possible in a modern commercial society.

Moreover, Smith saw his account of virtue as compatible with Aristotle's teaching in the Nicomachean Ethics.  This has led Ryan Hanley and other Smith scholars to interpret Smith as an Aristotelian virtue ethicist.  My explanation of this is that Smith's commercial liberalism coincides most closely with Aristotle's teaching about friendship and philosophy in Books 8 and 9 of the Nicomachean Ethics, which also happens to be one of the sections of Aristotle's moral and political writing that shows a propensity to liberalism, while also showing many references to his biology.

Aristotle thus manifested the liberalism of ancient Athens, which has recently been brought into view by classical scholars like Josiah Ober.  (See my post in September.)  Like McCloskey and Douglass North, Ober sees the evolution of liberalism as moving through three stages.  In the foraging bands of the Paleolithic, hunter-gatherers lived as equally free in their autonomy, because anyone who attempted dominance over others would be punished by others in the band enforcing customary norms of resistance to dominance.

Then, in the agrarian states that came with agricultural settlements, social hierarchy and exploitation of non-elites by elites arose as the prevalent form of order--"natural states" as North calls them.  But occasionally, after the collapse of these exploitative hierarchical orders, societies could fall back into the norms of rough egalitarianism that prevailed in the prehistoric foraging societies, which showed the human capacity for decentralized cooperation, which had evolved in the foraging environments of evolutionary adaptation.  This is what happened in ancient Greece, after the collapse of the Late Bronze-Age-Mycenaean kingdoms (around 1177 BCE), and the Greeks moved from palace-centered regimes to citizen-centered regimes.  Athens became an "open access society."  But even so, such citizen-centered democratic regimes were rare in the premodern world. 

It was not until the 18th and 19th centuries that liberal democratic open access regimes became prominent in the world.  Unlike the natural states, these modern open access regimes show greater adaptive flexibility, which leads to economic, social, and cultural flourishing, because such regimes are rooted in the naturally evolved human capacities for decentralized cooperation.  Through a Darwinian cultural evolution, liberal social orders have emerged as more adaptive than the alternatives.

Ober is persuasive in surveying the evidence against the common assumption of many scholars that ancient Greece was poor and experienced little or no economic growth. In fact, Greece in the classical era (the 5th and 4th centuries BCE) had rates of growth in both consumption and population that were much higher than the premodern normal and higher than any other period in Greek history until the middle of the 20th century.  Ober offers a Northian institutional explanation for this: "Fair rules and competition within a marketlike ecology of states promoted capital investment, innovation, and rational cooperation in a context of low transaction costs."

Ober notes that Athens allowed philosophical schools (like those of Plato and Aristotle) to organize themselves as voluntary associations in which philosophers could pursue the philosophic life in friendship with others, and thus the open access order of Athens applied to ideas as well as market exchanges.

Even Plato in The Republic recognizes that democracy is the only regime that secures the freedom that allows people like Socrates to study philosophy, and thus "anyone by nature free regards this city alone as a fit place to live."  Some readers of The Republic have seen this as Plato's endorsement of liberal democracy.

As I have indicated in some other posts, this shows the Aristotelian liberalism of philosophic friendship in a free society that Smith and Hume saw as emerging in the modern commercial society of Scotland in the 18th century.

This evolutionary classical liberalism can be rooted in a universal history of cosmic evolution like that originally presented by Herbert Spencer and recently presented by Eric Chaisson, David Christian, Fred Spier, and others under the term Big History.  I have written a long series of posts on this--in June 2008, March 2014, and January-March and June-July 2016.    I have also written some posts on the ancient Epicurean history of cosmic evolution as presented by Lucretius--in January and June 2012, and November 2015.

Chaisson is an astrophysicist who sees the entire history of the Universe from the Big Bang 14 billion years ago to the present as showing an evolution from simplicity to complexity that passes through eight epochs: the Particle Epoch, the Galactic Epoch, the Stellar Epoch, the Planetary Epoch, the Chemical Epoch, the Biological Epoch, the Cultural Epoch, and the Future Epoch.

Ever since the emergence of human self-conscious awareness, human beings have wondered about how the world came to be, how humans came to be, and how the human place in the world illuminates the meaning of human life.  To answer their questions, human beings have told themselves myths about cosmic history, and generally these myths have appealed to religious beliefs about the powers of supernatural beings. 

Chaisson says that his story of cosmic evolution is also a "cultural myth" (Epic, 426).  But it's a scientific myth that does not rely on beliefs about supernatural beings or philosophical speculation, because modern science as it began in the Renaissance can achieve true knowledge through the scientific method of gathering relevant data, formulating theories, and then testing those theories through rigorous observation and experimental testing and rejecting those theories that fail to be empirically confirmed.  Without mentioning Karl Popper, Chaisson assumes Popper's standard of falsifiability for science: a theory is not truly scientific if it is not in principle empirically testable, and a theory is falsified when it's empirical predictions fail.

I wonder whether this is true, or whether any science of cosmic evolution must confront the ultimate limits to science in facing fundamental mysteries of nature that are not open to observational or experimental study.  Herbert Spencer set forth a scientific account of cosmic evolution that is very similar to Chaisson's.  Like Chaisson, Spencer saw a cosmic evolution from simplicity to complexity, from homogeneity to heterogeneity, which could be explained through natural laws.  But unlike Chaisson, Spencer thought that increasing scientific knowledge reveals "the ultimate mystery of things," and thus provides "a firmer basis to all true Religion."  Modern science shows the power of the human intellect in explaining everything that comes within the range of human experience.  But it also shows the weakness of the human intellect in dealing with all that transcends human experience.

What happened before the Big Bang?  Are black holes real?  Is the universe that we see only one of an infinite number of universes?  Are such questions answerable through observation and experimentation?  Or do such questions arise from our symbolic imaginations about things that are forever beyond the range of human experience?

We must consider the possibility that the fundamental constituents of nature are either too small, too far away, or too far in the past to be observed directly by us or indirectly through our instruments, and thus nature's secrets are buried so deep or so far away that we have no way to test our theoretical speculations about them.

We must also consider the possibility that the Epic of Cosmic Evolution will not give human beings a privileged position, and that it will predict a future in which human beings and all other forms of life are gone forever, which will confirm the suspicion that the universe does not care for or about us.  Can human beings live with that?  This is what Strauss identified in the science of Lucretius as "the most terrible truth."  Will human beings inevitably turn to religious myths that deny this truth in affirming that it's all about us?

Chaisson agrees that the empirical evidence of the cosmic evolution of complexity as measured by energy rate density shows that human brains and human cultures are some of the most complex systems in the Universe.  And yet he sees no empirical evidence that cosmic evolution follows some grand design leading up to human life as having some privileged position.  While we can hope that the human species will endure into the near future, the empirical evidence of how ordered systems evolve and of the rare conditions required for human life make it clear that human life is unlikely to last for long, and that the eventual death of the Sun will bring earthly life to an end.

In Big History: Between Nothing and Everything (2014), David Christian, Cynthia Stokes Brown, and Craig Benjamin argue that the scientific origin story of Big History can "give us a powerful sense of meaning," and if this new origin story is taught to high school students around the world, this could provide us with a shared global understanding of our human place in the universe that could help us confront the greatest threats to human existence on earth today--such as nuclear war and global warming. 

Bill Gates has supported their project for providing material for high school teachers to teach Big History.  So that, while previously children were taught the religious origin stories of their various societies, which explained the cosmic meaning of their lives within their social order, the new scientifically grounded Big History can teach children around the world an origin story that depends on scientific evidence rather than religious faith, and which can sustain a global ethics comprehensible to human beings in all societies, who otherwise disagree in their religious beliefs.

By contrast, some scientists today claim that science and religion are compatible, and that the modern scientific understanding of the cosmos, and of the human place within the cosmos, supports the cosmic teleology of the theistic origin stories.  For example, Owen Gingerich is Professor of Astronomy and of the History of Science, Emeritus, at Harvard University and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics; and he argues that a scientific history of the cosmos shows evidence of divine purposefulness, because the physical and chemical constants of the universe seem to be fine-tuned for the emergence of a world hospitable to intelligent life.  Thus, science can sustain a cosmic teleology in which human life gains meaning as the fulfillment of God's purposes.

To reach this conclusion, however, Gingerich's view of cosmic history must stop at the present moment, with human intelligent life dominant over the Earth, and thus he refuses to reflect on the cosmic future and the likelihood that in the distant future all life will almost certainly be extinguished, because in that case we might as well conclude that the cosmos has been fine-tuned for eternal death.

If we could look at the entire history of the cosmos, we might see that during the first 10 billion years, there was no life; and then after a few billion years of life, the universe became eternally dead again.  So now life, including intelligent life, would seem to be only a momentary event in cosmic history.  Now, it would seem that the cosmos has been fine-tuned for an eternity of mindless death.

Many other prominent scientists have made claims like Gingerich about how the fine-tuning of the universe supports a theistic view of human life as the fulfillment of divine purposefulness.  This is a new version of the old argument from design (first stated by Plato)--that if nature looks like it has been intelligently designed, then this must point to a divinely intelligent designer.

Christian, Brown, and Benjamin do not mention such scientific theism as an alternative to their position.  Although they do not explicitly say so, they imply that modern science must be atheistic.  They certainly make it clear that the Biblical origin story must be rejected as false.

My position falls somewhere in between Gingerich and the Big History folks.  I agree with Gingerich that modern science does not dictate atheism, because scientific answers to questions about how things work fall short of answering questions about why they work that way, which are the questions that open up the possibility of divine purposefulness.  Questions about first causes point to the problem of ultimate explanation--that all explanation depends on some ultimate reality that cannot itself be explained.  All explanation presupposes the observable order of nature as the final ground of explanation.  To the question of why nature exists, or why it has the order that it does, there are only two possible answers.  Either we say this is a brute fact of our experience: that's just the way it is! Or we move beyond nature to nature's God as the creator of nature, but then we cannot explain why God is the way He is.  In looking for an ultimate explanation, we must stop somewhere with something that is unexplained--either an uncaused or self-caused nature or an uncaused or self-caused God.

If we could imagine ourselves somehow--billions of years into the future--being there to observe the end of all life and the approaching darkness of cosmic death, we might say: Well, it was good while it lasted.