Donald Trump and Steven Pinker: Authoritarian Populism Versus the Liberal Enlightenment

"Trade wars are good, and easy to win." 

In asserting that, Donald Trump has challenged the Liberal Enlightenment.  That challenge could play out in one of three ways.

If Trump succeeds in showing that trade wars are good--that they are economically and culturally beneficial for the United States and other countries--then he will have refuted the classical liberal claim that the global free trade in goods, services, and ideas is essential for maintaining the global progress that has occurred over the past two centuries.

If Trump sets off trade wars that turn out to be harmful and irreversible, and thus causes a global disaster through the collapse of the global order of free trade, he will have refuted the classical liberal confidence that the directional forces favoring liberal progress cannot be permanently reversed.

If Trump sets off trade wars that turn out to be harmful but reversible, this could confirm the classical liberal claim that, despite occasional setbacks, the global benefits of free trade in promoting human progress are so powerful and so clear that they cannot be permanently reversed.

In these ways, Trump's authoritarian populism challenges the Liberal Enlightenment as it's defended by Steven Pinker in his new book Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress.  In fact, Pinker frames much of his book as a refutation of Trump's authoritarian populism as rooted in the tradition of the right-wing Counter-Enlightenment.  Pinker has also summarized his argument in a debate a few years ago over the proposition "Do Humankind's Best Days Lie Ahead?"  Pinker and Matt Ridley defended the affirmative side against the negative side as defended by Alain de Botton and Malcolm Gladwell.  This  debate in Toronto, Canada, in 2015 was published as a book in 2016.

Pinker presents his history of human progress rooted in the Liberal Enlightenment as contrasted to the dark vision of human decline conveyed by Trump and his illiberal movement.  Pinker quotes Trump as describing "mothers and children trapped in poverty . . . an education system which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of all knowledge . . . and the crime, and the gangs, and the drugs that have stolen too many lives."  He also quotes Steve Bannon as saying that we are in an "outright war" that is "expanding and metastasizing," which has been produced by a "global power structure" that has subverted "the underlying spiritual and moral foundations of Christianity" (Pinker, xvii).

Against this, Pinker praises Barack Obama for saying, in his farewell speech, that the "essential spirit of this country" comes from the Enlightenment, which is responsible for 200 years of human progress.  He also praises Obama for rejecting Trump's denial of human progress, his dark view of America, and his claim that our whole world today is in decline.

Pinker thinks Obama is correct in observing:

"If you had to choose a moment in history to be born, and you did not know ahead of time who you would be--you didn't know whether you were going to be born into a wealthy family or a poor family, what country you'd be born in, whether you were going to be a man or a woman--if you had to choose blindly what moment you'd want to be born, you'd choose now."

A Rawlsian "veil of ignorance" applied to history favors our choosing to live in the present moment--the Liberal Enlightenment moment.  The core of Pinker's book is to show how the correctness of this choice can be confirmed by facts and statistical data.  The empirical data collected and analyzed by modern science prove that the last 200 hundred years have been years of unprecedented human progress as caused by the ideas and practices of the Liberal Enlightenment.  In doing this, Pinker's book covers much of the same ground that I have covered in my series of posts on the human progress promoted by classical liberalism (here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here).

To support what he calls "the facts of human progress" (363), Pinker presents 73 charts of statistical data--similar to the charts that he employed in The Better Angels of Our Nature.  These statistical charts show trend lines of progress for at least ten of the good things in life.  (You can see many of Pinker's charts in a video of his recent lecture at the Cato Institute, which is available here.)

First, life itself.  The average human life span today is longer than ever before in human history--over seventy.

Second, health.  Many diseases that killed millions of people in the past--such as small pox and cattle plague--have been totally eliminated, and many more will soon be eliminated.  Similarly, the deaths from famine have dropped dramatically.

Third, prosperity.  In 1800, at least 85% of all human beings around the world lived in grinding poverty.  Today, less than 10% live in extreme poverty, and in a few years, it could be zero.

Fourth, peace.  Wars between powerful nations have become almost completely obsolete. Great powers have not fought a war against one another for seventy years.  There are still civil wars, but they are less destructive than interstate wars, and there are fewer of them.

Fifth, safety.  The rates of death by homicide have fallen drastically.  Even the risk from terrorists is for most of us negligible.  People today are more likely to die from bee stings than from a terrorist attack, despite the fear-mongering by Trump and others.

Sixth, freedom.  60% or more of the world's population lives in free societies.  There is more freedom--personal freedom, economic freedom, and political freedom--than ever before in human history.

Seventh, knowledge.  Throughout most of human history, most human beings (90% or more) were illiterate.  Today, this has been reversed, and most human beings (85% or more) can read.  In 1820, only about 17% of people around the world had a basic education.  Today, at least 82% have a basic education, and the trend is moving to 100%.

Eighth, human rights.  Most of the most barbaric customs in human history--such as human sacrifice, infanticide, slavery, heretic burning, torture executions, and foot binding--have been eliminated.  Other cruelties--such as capital punishment, violence against women, female genital mutilation, and the criminalization of homosexuality--are being reduced.

Ninth, gender equity.  Women today are on average better educated, freer, earning more, and more powerful than women have ever been.

Tenth, intelligence.  In every country, IQ has been rising by three points a decade.

Of course, Pinker recognizes that to see all of this as moral progress, we need to agree on some standards of moral judgment--that life is better than death, health is better than sickness, wealth is better than poverty, freedom is better than coercion, knowledge is better than ignorance, and happiness is better than misery.  Does anyone reasonably disagree with such judgments?

But then how does Pinker explain the supporters of Trump and other authoritarian populists around the world--people who apparently don't see themselves as benefitting from this global liberal progress?

One common explanation is economic inequality.  Even if people at all levels of society around the world have seen an improvement in their living standards on average, some people have benefited more than others, and the richest people have benefited the most.  Pinker's answer to this is to argue that we should not confuse inequality with poverty.  There should be no moral objection to inequality as long as everyone on average is being raised out of poverty into wealth: the rich get richer, and the poor get richer also.

One objection to this is that what really counts for people's happiness is not absolute poverty but relative poverty--that people living in material comfort and even luxury feel poor if they see others who are richer than they are.  Pinker's response is to point to surveys suggesting that people in unequal but wealthy societies are happy as long as they see some hope that they can improve their economic standing, and as long as they see the wealth of the richest people as somehow merited (98-102).

Moreover, Pinker argues, the world as a whole is becoming more equal, because the poorest countries are experiencing growth rates higher than for the richest countries, and thus global inequality is declining.  One of the primary reasons for this is global trade that has benefited the poorer countries around the world.

And yet, Pinker admits that even if everyone around the world has on average benefited from global free trade, the benefits for some have been less than for others.  This might explain why "the lower middle classes of the rich world" are the supporters of Trump and other populist leaders: "globalization helped the lower and middle classes of poor countries, and the upper class of rich countries, much more than it helped the lower middle class of rich countries."  But then, Pinker can conclude: "it's true that the world's poor have gotten richer in part at the expense of the American lower middle class, and if I were an American politician I would not publicly say that the tradeoff was worth it.  But as citizens of the world considering humanity as a whole, we have to say that the tradeoff is worth it" (113).

Jennifer Szalai (in her review in the New York Times) probably speaks for many readers of Pinker's book when she points to this passage as illustrating his callous utilitarianism: "he has little patience for individual tragedy; it's the aggregate that excites him," but "life isn't lived in the aggregate."  Is it the "individual tragedy" of the "American lower middle class" that has motivated the Trump supporters?

Oddly, Pinker seems to contradict himself when he says in one part of his book that what really motivates the Trump supporters is not "economic insecurity" but "cultural backlash": less educated older white rural voters cannot accept the liberal Enlightenment humanism of the urban ethnically pluralist society favored by younger educated voters (342-43).

Pinker presents a chart showing "Populist support across generations, in 2016," in the United States and Europe, that shows that the percentage voting for populist candidates (including Trump) falls off with the year of birth: younger voters are not attracted to populist candidates.  Moreover, other charts show how younger generations favor the "emancipative values" or "liberal values" of the Liberal Enlightenment.  If this is so, Pinker suggests, then the electoral support for populist candidates must decline over time as the older generation passes away (342).

This assumes that the liberal younger voters will turn out to vote.  And Pinker recognizes that Trump's electoral victory in the Electoral College depended on a low turnout among those who might have voted against him.

If Trump does initiate a global trade war, and if the consequences are as harmful as predicted by classical liberals, we will see whether the Trump supporters are willing to accept economic decline as a price for the illiberal culture of authoritarian populism.

In my next post, I will set up a debate between Pinker's Enlightenment Now and Patrick Deneen's Why Liberalism Failed.

The Empirical Data for Human Progress through the Liberal Enlightenment

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.  As the above chart indicates, in surveys asking people whether the world is getter 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.  For example, in public opinion surveys, most people around the world say that world poverty has been increasing.  In the United States, only 8% of the people believe that over the last 30 years the proportion of the world population living in extreme poverty has decreased.  But these 8% are correct.

In this chart, the top line shows the proportion of the world's population living in extreme poverty, defined as living on less than $2 a day (measured in international dollars according to prices of 2011), from 1820 to 1990.  In 1820, 94% of the world's population lived in extreme poverty.  In 1990, it was down to 52%.  For the second line, poverty is defined as living on less than $1 a day.  In 1820, 84% of the world's population lived in such poverty.  In 1990, it was down to 24%.  The shorter line to the right is based on World Bank data for 1980 to 2015 showing the level of poverty defined as living on less than $1.90 a day.  In 1980, 44% of the world population was living in such severe poverty.  By 2015, this was down to 9.6%.  This shows a steady decrease in extreme poverty over the last two hundred years, with the decrease accelerating over the past 30 years.  Moreover, economic historians have found evidence that for all of human history prior to about 1800 over 95% of human beings lived in such extreme poverty.

Perhaps the best place to find this kind of data is "Our World in Data" -- an online publication by Max Roser (an economist at Oxford University) that surveys the data on the development of human living conditions at a global scale.  Most of the data is presented in visual charts and global maps that show historical trends across time.

This data shows that human life in general is better today in at least ten ways:

(1) There are more lives and longer lives.
(2) Life is healthier
(3) Life is richer and less impoverished.
(4) Life shows more equality of opportunity.
(5) Life is more peaceful.
(6) Life is freer.
(7) Family life is better.
(8) Life is more environmentally sustainable.
(9) Life is more enlightened.
(10) Life is more virtuous.

Relying largely on the data collected by Roser, I will be writing a series of blog posts presenting some of the evidence for these ten progressive trends as caused by the norms and institutions of the Liberal Enlightenment that promote increasing freedom, knowledge, and technology. 

I can foresee, however, that most readers will not be convinced by this evidence.  The reason for this is that the human mind has evolved cognitive biases that make it hard for us to believe that human life is improving and easy for us to feel worried and dissatisfied. 

One such bias is what psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky call the "availability heuristic."  The more memorable an event is, because it's horribly shocking, the more probable we think it is. 

So, for example, when we see shocking reports about terrorist attacks, we assume that such attacks are highly probable, and so we become terrified.  I remember a friend of mine in Manhattan, Kansas, telling me that when she first saw the television coverage of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York City and Washington, DC, she left her office, picked up her son at his elementary school, and returned home where she hugged him for hours.  Of course, she knew intellectually that her son in Kansas was in no danger of being attacked by terrorists.  But emotionally she felt as if her family was under attack.  Many Americans and many people around the world felt the same way that day.

In fact, that's the whole aim of terrorists--to throw an entire community of people into a state of panic.  After the killing of 14 people in a terrorist attack by radical Muslims in San Bernardino, California, in December of 2015, Trump proposed that all Muslims should be banned from entering the United States.  But very few Muslims become terrorists. And the statistical possibility of being killed by a terrorist in the United States is extremely low.  Ordinary homicide is more likely.  But even homicidal violence in the United States has been declining since a peak in the early 1990s.  Nevertheless, the reports of terrorist attacks have such a shocking impact on us that we are inclined to be thrown into a panic that distorts our judgment about what should be done to protect ourselves.

The great danger here is that if we do not recognize the human progress brought to us by liberal norms and institutions, we might become so fearful and angry that we will turn away from our liberal principles and embrace the illiberal rhetoric of a demagogue who promises to save us.

Although the human progress achieved by the Liberal Enlightenment is real, it is not inevitable, as should be clear from the catastrophic suffering brought into the middle of the 20th century by the illiberal regimes of Stalin, Hitler, and Mao.  The recent resurgence of ethnic nationalism in its attack on liberal globalism suggests that this could happen again.

The Evolution of Human Progress Through the Liberal Enlightenment: Bailey and Tupy

 "All things considered, do you think the world is getting better or worse, or neither getting better nor worse?"

In 2016, the global public opinion survey company YouGov asked people in 17 countries to answer that question.  58% thought the world was getting worse.  30% thought it was neither getting better nor worse.  Only 11% thought the world was getting better.  Other surveys with similar questions yield the same results.  Most people around the world think things are getting worse, so that on the whole there has been no human progress.

This is especially remarkable if one considers that most of these surveys are online surveys, and the people answering such surveys are probably smart and well-educated people.  So smart people around the world think things are generally getting worse.

They are wrong.  

If one looks at the relevant factual evidence for global trends over the past few centuries, it is clear that the world is getter better, because human life is more satisfying for more people that ever before in human history.  On the whole, people are living longer, healthier, and happier lives.  Their lives are generally more peaceful--less exposed to violence--than ever before.  They have more opportunity to live their lives as they wish.  They have more chances to satisfy their natural human desires and thus to live a flourishing human life.

The reason for this is freedom.  Over the past two centuries, there has been a progressive expansion of freedom around the world.  It has been freedom at all levels: economic freedom, social freedom, political freedom, and intellectual freedom.  This has been driven by the global spread of liberal free-market democracies.

We can call this the Liberal Enlightenment. I have written about the empirical data showing human progress through the Liberal Enlightenment throughout history--in ancient Athens, for example.  But the accelerating growth in this progress has come over the past few centuries with the global spread of Lockean liberal ideas and institutions.  Some of my posts on this are here, here, here, here, here, here. and here.

Much of this evidence for human progress through liberalism has been presented by Max Roser at his "Our World In Data" website, by Steven Pinker in his books--Better Angels of Our Nature and Enlightenment Now--in the Cato Institute's Human Freedom Index, and in Marian Tupy's "Human Progress" website of the Cato Institute.

Now we have a new book that conveniently and beautifully presents this evidence--Ronald Bailey and Marian Tupy's Ten Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know--And Many Others You Will Find Interesting (Cato Institute).  They present 78 global trends showing that the world really is getting better.  For each of these trends, they provide a one-page vignette accompanied with a one-page chart or graph displaying the data showing the progressive trend.  In this way, they follow the example of Pinker in the deft use of the visually engaging presentation of data to support his argument for human progress through modern liberal enlightenment.  (I must complain, however, that those of us with declining eyesight in our old age have to use a magnifying glass to read this book because of its tiny font.)

Here are their Top 10 Trends:

1.  The world economy has grown more than a hundredfold since 1820.

2.  While most people throughout history have lived in extreme poverty, today less than 10% of the global population lives in poverty.

3.  We are not running out of natural resources, because resources have become more abundant relative to the demand for them.

4.  We are moving towards a "Peak Population": the world population has grown from under one billion in 1800 to about 7.7 billion today, although this rate of growth is now slowing; and demographers are now projecting that the population will peak later this century at somewhere between 8.9 and 10.9 billion, and then it will probably decline.

5.  Because of the growing supply of food around the world, there is very little famine.

6.  The forested areas of the Earth have been expanding overall, despite the deforestation in the tropics, which shows that human beings are withdrawing from the natural world.

7.  While throughout history, most human beings have lived in rural areas and engaged in agricultural labor, now most human beings live in cities; and this urban life brings economic, cultural, and environmental improvement.

8.  Over the past 200 years, there has been a steep decline in the proportion of countries under autocratic governments, along with a steep increase in the proportion under democratic governments, which confirms Francis Fukuyama's claim that liberal democracy has become the final form of government for humanity.

9.  Over the past half century, the number of interstate wars has declined; and this seems to be because capitalist democracies are more peace-loving than other regimes.

10. Because of increased wealth and technological progress, the deaths from natural disasters--such as earthquakes, floods, storms, wildfires, and epidemics--have declined dramatically.   

Looking at such claims, a critical reader of this book might ask at least five questions.  (1) Can Bailey and Tupy explain why so many smart people think the world is getting worse?  (2) How do they explain the negative trends that apparently show historical decline?  (3) How persuasive is their evidence for these 78 progressive trends?  (4) Have they ignored some important trends--such as religious toleration and secularization?  (5) If they are right about this human progress, have they explained its ultimate cause?  I will take up each of these questions.

(1) WHY DO SO MANY OF US THINK THE WORLD IS IN DECLINE?

The answer, Bailey and Tupy suggest, is that the human mind suffers from some psychological glitches that mislead us so that we pay more attention to what's negative in our lives than what's positive.  We are surrounded by the journalistic reporting of news, and news is generally bad news, because that's what grabs our attention.  

So, for example, acts of violence--murders, terrorist attacks, killing in war--are dramatic news; but the fact that the rate of killing through homicide and war has been declining is not news.  This is what behavioral scientists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman called the "availability bias": shocking events come easily to mind, but that there has been a slow decline in such shocking events does not catch our attention.  

When Bailey and Tupy report that there has been a slow but steep decline over the past one hundred years in the rate of deaths from infectious disease, many of us will think: But what about COVID-19?  The disturbing harm from this pandemic today so fills our minds that it's hard to believe the historical data showing the general progressive trend towards protecting us from infectious diseases.

It is also possible that we have an evolved instinct for negativity.  If you're an ancient hunter-gatherer wondering whether that rustle in the grass is caused by a lion or the wind, it's best to assume it's a lion.  So perhaps we have inherited from our evolutionary ancestors a propensity to see threats everywhere.

Moreover, Bailey and Tupy observe, progress tends to mask itself, because as we become better at solving our problems, our expectations are raised, and we are frustrated by any problems that are not yet solved.  So, for example, it's hard to feel good when Bailey and Tupy report that there has been a big decline in hunger and malnutrition around the world, because we worry about the many people who are still hungry and malnourished.

(2) WHAT ABOUT THE NEGATIVE TRENDS?

The 78 global trends that Bailey and Tupy present in their book are all positive trends that show human progress towards a better life.  But of course they have to admit that some global trends are negative.  And so we must wonder whether they are justified in not giving prominence to those negative trends, and whether recognizing those negative trends negates their story of progress.

They respond to this concern by quoting Steven Pinker: "It's essential to realize that progress does not mean that everything gets better for everyone, everywhere, all the time.  That would be a miracle, that wouldn't be progress" (1). So does this imply that true progress means that most things get better for most people, most places, most of the time?  Must the positive trends outweigh or outnumber the negative trends?  Or must we see evidence that the positive trends are likely over time to eliminate or slow down the negative trends?

Bailey and Tupy mention seven examples of global negative trends.  Manmade climate change from increasing atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide is creating serious problems for human beings in this century.  Increasing plastic debris in the oceans is harmful to the environment.  Many wildlife populations are declining.  The areas of tropical rainforest are shrinking.  Many people around the world are malnourished.  Many are dying in violent conflicts.  And we all know about the global coronavirus pandemic.

But then they try to show how some of their 78 positive trends can alleviate these negative trends.  For example, while there has been no reduction in the absolute quantities of carbon dioxide emissions, they observe, there has been a decline in emissions per dollar, which they call "decarbonizing the economy," because there's an economic incentive for businesses to reduce their energy costs (115-16).  And in the United States, over the past 50 years, although carbon dioxide emissions have increased by 22%, the total emission of six principal pollutants dropped by 74%; and during this period, the gross domestic product increased 275%.  This shows that "richer becomes cleaner" (169-70).

Another positive trends is the accelerating speed of vaccine development (77-78).  It took thousands of years before scientists developed vaccines for polio, smallpox, cholera, typhoid, and measles.  But the vaccine for Ebola was developed only 43 years after the discovery of the virus.  And human trials for a COVID-19 vaccine began only four months after the virus was discovered.  Even if a COVID-19 vaccine is not discovered, Bailey and Tupy suggest, other treatments are likely to be developed quickly to end the pandemic.

As long as the positive trends outweigh the negative trends, we can see that on the whole the arc of history bends towards progress.

(3)  ASSESSING THE EVIDENCE FOR THE POSITIVE TRENDS

For each of their 78 trends, Bailey and Tupy provide a chart or graph that displays the empirical evidence for that trend.  The evidence comes from databases compiled by various scholars and reputable agencies--such the World Bank, the United Nations, and the Environmental Protection Agency.

I think that most readers will find this evidence to be reliable in most cases.  But I did see a few places in the book where the evidence looks dubious.

For two of their trends--Trend 1 ("The Great Enrichment") and Trend 13 ("Global Income Is Rising")--Bailey and Tupy rely on the database for the statistics of economic history compiled by Angus Maddison.  Maddison (1926-2010) was a scholar of quantitative macroeconomic history who spent his life collecting and analyzing statistical estimates for gross domestic product (GDP) and population for countries around the world and throughout history from ancient Rome to the present.  When he died in 2010, his database was preserved and extended by people at the "Maddison Project" at the University of Groningen.

Using Maddison's data, Bailey and Tupy were able to design graphs showing the growth in the total world economy and in global GDP per capita from year 1 AD to the present.  These are two of the most dramatic hockey-stick graphs in the book.  Global GDP per capita starts in year 1 at $800 (as measured in 2011 US dollars), and the line stays flat until the year 1800, when it rises to $1,140 per person per year, then to $2,180 in 1900, and finally to $13,172 in 2008.  Bailey and Tupy can point to this as showing that between 1800 and 1900, "humanity made over twice as much progress in 100 years as it did in the previous 1800 years."  This also shows that "the real standard of living rose by more than tenfold between 1800 and 2008" (33).

Any careful reader will ask how Maddison came up with these numbers.  By the middle of the 19th century, modern statistical offices and censuses were collecting statistics for the economies of Europe and North America.  But for the thousands of years of economic history prior to 1800, it's hard to find documented economic statistics.

If one goes to Maddison's books, one can see that his estimates for GDP per capita in the year 1 AD in 20 countries as measured in 1990 international US dollars ranges mostly from $400 to $450.  For example, for Sweden, Mexico, and North America, it's $400; for Belgium and Portugal, it's $450 (Maddison 2007, 382).  One looks in vain for any explanation as to how he decided on these numbers.  How does he know that in 1 AD the North American Indians were living on the equivalent of $400 per person per year?  

Maddison says: "Before 1500, the element of conjecture in the estimates is very large indeed" (Maddison 2001, 259).  He uses the words "conjecture" and "assumption" a lot.  He assumes that prior to the year 1000, most people in most countries lived close to subsistence levels of income, which he sets at $400 per capita per year.  But he does not explain how he arrived at this $400 number.  

Some of his colleagues at the University of Groningen have said that "his strategy was to produce numbers even if a solid basis for them did not always exist" (Bolt and van Zanden 2014, 628).  They correct Maddison's estimate for subsistence by lowering it to $250-$300, but they don't explain how they arrived at this new number.

Economic historian Gregory Clark identifies this "element of conjecture" in Maddison's numbers as the problem at the core of the whole Maddison Project.  "All the numbers Maddison estimates for the years before 1820 are fictions, as real as the relics peddled around Europe in the Middle Ages" (Clark 2009, 1156).

For this reason, I think Bailey and Tupy are mistaken in relying on Maddison's fictitious database for the economic history prior to 1820.  Remarkably, they are not alone in this.  Many economists and economic historians have used Maddison's data for developing and testing theories of economic development while remaining silent about the "element of conjecture" in his numbers.

There are a few other points where Bailey and Tupy make conjectural projections about future trends that cannot be decisively confirmed by empirical evidence.  Two examples of this are "Peak Population" (Trend 4) and "Peak Farmland" (Trend 48).

The demographic data show that there has been a stunning growth in world population over the past 200 years, so that now the world population is around 7.7 billion.  The demographic data also show that over the past 75 years the growth in population has continued, but the rate of growth has slowed, because as people become wealthy and well-educated, their fertility rate tends to decline.  As women gain social and economic freedom, they choose to have fewer children, so that they can invest resources in those children, allowing them to flourish in a modern economy.  This is called the "demographic transition," and I have written about it (here).

This demographic database provides empirical evidence for the growth of human population--first rapid and then slowing--up to the present.  But of course it does not allow us to precisely predict the future.  If there is going to be a "peak population," as Bailey and Tupy claim, identifying it requires a speculative projection that cannot be settled by empirical evidence.  The United Nations' World Population Prospects 2019 projects that the world population will reach 10.9 billion in the year 2100.  Bailey and Tupy say that this is too high, because it does not put enough weight on the demographic transition that will lead more and more women to choose to have few children, which is likely to keep the peak population well below 10 billion; and after that peak, the world population will decline.  This seems plausible to me, but this can only be a conjectural projection that cannot be confirmed by present evidence.

Similarly, their "Peak Farmland" trend is a speculative prediction that has some plausibility based on some evidence, but the evidence cannot precisely confirm the prediction.  Here's the figure used by Bailey and Tupy that presents the data showing the gradual rise of global arable land from 1961 to 2009, followed by projections of a drop of global arable land to 2060.

This figure comes from Jesse Ausubel and his colleagues (Ausubel 2014, 2015; Ausubel et al. 2012).  Ausubel is often identified with "ecomodernism"--the idea that the best way to reverse environmental degradation and restore natural wildness is to liberate technological innovation in response to free-market incentives to solve environmental problems.  So, for example, he foresees that advances in farming technology along with changes in consumer tastes and a slowing growth in human population could bring about what he calls Peak Farmland, which would allow for a large global restoration of land to Nature.

Compared with what they were doing 40 years ago, American potato farmers grow about 40% more tons of potatoes, while planting about 20% fewer acres.  Similarly, American corn farmers now grow about five times as many bushels as they did in 1940 on the same land.  Because of the technological ingenuity of farmers, less land can produce more calories, so that agricultural food production can increase while farming acreage decreases.  At the same time, there has been rising demand for chicken and corn and falling demand for potatoes and beef.  Depending on how these and other trends play out, it is possible that over the next 40 years we could see nearly 988 million acres restored to nature, which is twice the size of the United States east of the Mississippi.

That's the optimistic projection in the figure above.  But while this is based on the empirical evidence for some trends in recent history, this projection for the future is conjectural.

To be continued . . .

REFERENCES

Ausubel, Jesse H. 2014. "Peak Farmland and Potatoes." Plenary address to the 2014 Potato Business Summit of the United Potato Growers of America, San Antonio, 8 January.

Ausubel, Jesse H. 2015. "The Return to Nature: How Technology Liberates the Environment." Breakthrough Journal 5 (Summer).

Ausubel, Jesse H., Iddo K. Wernick, and Paul E. Waggoner. 2012. "Peak Farmland and the Prospect for Land Sparing." Population and Development Review 38 (Supplement): 221-242.

Bailey, Ronald, and Marian L. Tupy. 2020. Ten Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know, and Many Others You Will Find Interesting. Washington, DC: Cato Institute.

Bolt, Jutta, and Jan Luiten van Zanden. 2014. "The Maddison Project: Collaborative Research on Historical National Accounts."  The Economic History Review 67 (3): 627-651.

Clark, Gregory. 2009. Review of Angus Maddison, Contours of the World Economy, 1-2030 AD.  Journal of Economic History 69: 1156-1161.

Maddison, Angus. 2001. The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective. Paris: Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Maddison, Angus. 2007. Contours of the World Economy, 1-2030 AD: Essays in Macro-Economic History. Oxford: Oxford 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.

Smith and Strauss on Bourgeois Liberalism and the Philosophic Life

Steven Smith's Modernity and Its Discontents elaborates the argument of Leo Strauss and the Straussians for the "crisis of liberalism" as showing "the problem of the bourgeois."  The basic idea for Smith's book comes from Strauss's "Three Waves of Modernity"--the idea that the first wave of liberal modernity is theoretically flawed in ways that provoke two waves of illiberal attacks on modernity. This suggests the question of whether Strauss and the Straussians are proposing some illiberal alternative to the bourgeois liberal order. 

Smith's answer is no, because while Strauss was a critic of liberal democracy, he was a friendly critic who saw liberal democracy (like that of the United States) as the best practicable regime for the modern world, despite its weaknesses.  And, therefore, Smith says, Strauss was actually "a classical liberal who believed that present-day liberalism requires the support of certain premodern sources of authority if it is to be sustainable" (292).   Smith is relying on what Will Altman has called the "Golden Sentence" of Straussian apologetics: "We are not permitted to be flatterers of democracy precisely because we are friends and allies of democracy."  (Altman points out that Strauss is careful here to use the word "we" rather than "I," and that Strauss says that Maimonides uses the word "we" to distinguish a popular opinion from what he himself believes.)

It's not clear how Smith's claim that Strauss was a friend of liberalism is consistent with Smith's observation that in his lecture on "German Nihilism," Strauss implicitly included himself among those young German nihilists who preferred a "closed morality" that was "based on such old-fashioned virtues as loyalty, duty, honor, and self-sacrifice" as showing a higher level of humanity than an "open morality" that was "divorced from the particularities of nation, race, or class" (250). Smith is silent about Strauss's assertion in "German Nihilism" that National Socialism was "a return to a pre-modern ideal."

We must wonder whether Smith's reading of Strauss as a classical liberal is persuasive.  In particular, given what Strauss said about the supremacy of the philosophic life and about the conflict between philosophy and society, we must wonder whether a bourgeois liberal regime can allow for such a philosophic life.  And if the open society of a liberal regime can be open to philosophy, does that refute Strauss's claim that every stable society must be a closed society that cannot tolerate the skeptical questioning of philosophers?

In order to separate Strauss from the illiberal critics of the Enlightenment, and thus protect Strauss from Will Altman's charge of being a Jewish Nazi, Smith distinguishes between the radical Counter-Enlightenment of those like Joseph de Maistre, Friedrich Nietzsche, Georges Sorel, and Martin Heidegger, and the moderate Counter-Enlightenment of those like Strauss, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Isaiah Berlin (348-49).

Smith's distinction here between two forms of Counter-Enlightenment is strange for at least two reasons.  First, to put Strauss on the side of Berlin rather than Heidegger ignores Strauss's severe criticism of Berlin as failing in his attempted defense of liberalism and Strauss's fervent endorsement of Heidegger as the one great thinker of our time who has refuted liberalism.  Strauss writes: "All rational liberal philosophic positions have lost their significance and power. One may deplore this, but I for one cannot bring myself to clinging to philosophic positions which have been shown to be inadequate. I am afraid that we shall have to make a very great effort in order to find a solid basis for rational liberalism.  Only a great thinker could help us in our intellectual plight.  But here is the great trouble: the only great thinker in our time is Heidegger" ("Introduction to Heideggerian Existentialism," 29).  Remarkably, Smith is silent about this claim by Strauss that Heidegger has refuted any argument for rational liberalism.

The second reason why Smith's distinction is strange is that in assigning Nietzsche to the radical Counter-Enlightenment, Smith is silent about Nietzsche's defense of the Enlightenment and liberalism in Human, All Too Human and other writings from his middle period.  As I have argued in some previous posts, Nietzsche lays out in his middle writings a vigorous defense of Darwinian aristocratic liberalism as superior to the Dionysian aristocratic radicalism of his later writings.

Smith does not see that in order to push Strauss towards Berlin and away from Heidegger, he has to implicitly reinterpret Strauss as a Platonic or Aristotelian liberal who embraces Berlin's advocacy of both liberal pluralism and negative liberty, so that the individual liberty secured by a liberal regime allows a few people to choose the philosophic life as the highest end, while most others choose different lives with a different ranking of ends.  In other words, Smith has to interpret Strauss as being what Michael and Catherine Zuckert have identified as a Midwest Straussian, who believed that bourgeois liberty allowed for the expression of the bourgeois virtues, which could include the intellectual virtues of the philosophic life.

Another way of putting this is to say that Smith has to read Strauss's classical liberalism as based on a liberal interpretation of both Plato and Aristotle.

Strauss is best known for his illiberal interpretation of Plato as arguing that the philosophic life is the only naturally good way of life, and that this philosophic life is necessarily in irreconcilable conflict with society.  As Smith puts it, this can be expressed as a syllogism:

"Major Premise: Philosophy is the attempt to replace opinion, including opinions about political things, by knowledge.

"Minor Premise: Opinion is the medium of society.

"Conclusion: Philosophy is necessarily at odds with society." (304)

If this is true, then Strauss would seem to be saying that a liberal open society is either impossible or a foolish mistake, because no stable society can be open to philosophical questioning.  No society can safely tolerate the philosophic life.  Therefore, philosophers must employ esoteric writing to hide what they are thinking, and thus protect philosophy from social persecution, while also protecting society from subversion by philosophical questioning.  Plato's metaphor of the cave in The Republic shows that society must always be ruled by illusory opinions rather than philosophic enlightenment.  And Plato's Apology of Socrates shows that society must persecute Socratic philosophers who corrupt the young and deny the gods of the city.

But as Smith indicates, Strauss also offers a liberal interpretation of Plato.  While Book 8 of The Republic contains the "severest indictment" of democracy, according to Strauss, it also presents democracy as a "multicolored coat" in which every way of life, including the philosophic life, can be lived.  And, after all, Socrates lived his philosophic life in Athens until the age of seventy, and he could not have lived this life in Sparta (298).  Thus, as Will Altman has argued, Plato might endorse liberal democracy as the regime most open to the philosophic life, because "anyone by nature free regards this city alone as a fit place to live" (Republic, 562c). 

This suggests the possibility that a liberal open society could overcome the conflict between society and philosophy by creating a free market of ideas, so that philosophers would no longer need to practice esoteric writing.  In fact, Arthur Melzer has pointed to that in his Philosophy between the Lines.  Since about 1800, he observes, the art of secret writing has largely disappeared, because in modern open societies, we no longer see the need for hiding dangerous philosophic ideas.  That's why Strauss's Persecution and the Art of Writing was so novel--and controversial--because he was rediscovering an art of esoteric writing that was common before 1800, but that had been rendered unnecessary by the triumph of the liberal open society over the past two centuries.  Smith suggests the same point when he writes: "It is certainly far from evident that a strategy adopted by Halevi, Al-Farabi, and Maimonides, writing in times of considerable hostility to philosophy, remains applicable in a modern democratic age where the demands for intellectual probity and 'transparency' have become not just private but also public virtues" (308).

Notice the startling implication here.  What often seems to be Strauss's signature idea--the irresolvable conflict between society and philosophy and the necessity for esoteric writing as dictated by that conflict--has been refuted by the success of bourgeois liberalism in creating an open society where the philosophic life can be openly lived in the free market of ideas.  Does that follow from Strauss's liberal interpretation of Plato?

Smith also suggests a Straussian liberal interpretation of Aristotle, although he is not as explicit about this as he is with Plato.  Strauss often asserted the supremacy of the philosophic life as the only naturally good life, in contrast to which the merely moral person appears as "a mutilated human being" (Natural Right and History, 151).  Book 10 of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics can be read as supporting this idea of the philosophic life as a purely solitary contemplative life that is superior to the moral life.  From this view, as Smith says, "morality is at most instrumental to the attainment of a kind of contemplative autonomy," in which the philosopher does not need morality or any engagement with other human beings (309).  Here there seems to be no common ground between the moral life of society and the philosophic life of the solitary thinker.  Here Aristotle seems to affirm a dominant end conception of the good life as directed to one end--philosophic contemplation.

But in the books on friendship (Books 8 and 9) of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle speaks of the political association (koinonia) as an association of associations in which people pursue their diverse conceptions of the good life in association with others who share their ethical ends, and this includes those who pursue the philosophic life in association with their philosophic friends (NE, 1160a9-31, 1170a13-1170b19).  This conforms to what Smith identifies as Strauss's understanding of philosophy as a way of life, in which the aim is "to create spiritual communities in which the individual members could seek to live freely and in friendship with others who had chosen a similar way of life" (293).  In democratic Athens, philosophical schools could form voluntary private associations (like the Academy and the Lyceum) in which philosophic friends could gather with others who shared their devotion to the philosophic life.  In this understanding of Athens as an association of associations, Aristotle seems to affirm an inclusive end conception of the good as a multiplicity of moral and intellectual goods, with different ways of life organized by different rankings of those multiple goods.

This suggests the possibility, which Smith never considers, that modern liberalism is the expansion of ancient Athenian liberalism.  After all, even Strauss admitted that "the city of Athens was rather liberal" ("The Liberalism of Classical Political Philosophy," 47).  This would cast doubt on the sharp Straussian dichotomy of ancients and moderns.

Aristotle's inclusive end conception of the human good as supporting a free society in which individuals pursue their diverse ends in association with others of like mind looks a lot like Berlin's understanding of liberal pluralism and negative liberty, in which the negative liberty of an open society allows for the fullest expression of value pluralism in the diverse associations that people form to pursue their differing conceptions of the good life.  We might think that Strauss could not have endorsed this, because he criticized Berlin's value pluralism as a relativism that created the crisis of liberalism by denying any absolutist affirmation of liberalism as conforming to the human good of human nature. 

But as Smith indicates, Berlin denied that his value pluralism was value relativism (277-86).  While Berlin believed that there were many different good ends for human life, and that these good ends were not perfectly harmonious, yet he believed that these good ends were not "infinitely many," because they were all within the "human horizon."  Berlin affirmed both "a common human nature" and "a wide variety of cultural experience" (The Crooked Timber of Humanity, 11).  The pluralism of human nature--that human beings have different natural ends or desires--is an objective truth about human nature, and therefore this pluralism is not relativism.  By virtue of our shared human nature, we all share in the generic goods of human life--such as, for example, self-preservation, family life, friendship, social status, religious understanding, and intellectual understanding.  (These generic goods correspond to what I have called the 20 natural desires of our evolved human nature.)  But how we rank these generic goods will vary across cultures and across individuals.  A liberal open society secures the negative liberty that allows for individuals live different ways of life in association with others in their families and associations, and these different ways of life will manifest different rankings of those generic goods.  Those with the temperament and talents of a Socrates will live a philosophic life that ranks intellectual understanding as higher than the other generic goods.  Others will live different kinds of life with different rankings of the generic goods.

This seems to be what John Locke meant by a free society that would secure the pursuit of happiness for diverse individuals with diverse conceptions of the good life rooted in human nature.  The summum bonum is not by nature the same for all human beings, but all human beings by nature "are both concerned and fitted to search out their summum bonum" (Essay Concerning Human Understanding, IV.12.11).  Locke's point seems to be that there is a summum bonum--a highest good--for each person that constitutes the natural standard of happiness for each person.  But there is no single highest good for all people, because different people will rank the generic goods of life in different ways.

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.

A bourgeois liberal society conforms best to this 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" (352).  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?

The End of the End of History?

In recent weeks, my thoughts have moved back and forth from the Declaration of Independence as the beginning of the end of history to Trump's right-wing nationalism as the end of the end of history.  (Is it significant that I am writing this on Bastille Day?)

Ever since it was published in 1989, Francis Fukuyama's article "The End of History?" has provoked a continuing debate over the question he posed in his title.  History as a continuing series of unpredictable events will never come to an end, Fukuyama conceded.  But history as the human search for the fully satisfying social order might have come to an end, he suggested, because with the defeat of fascism and Nazism in World War Two 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 only fully satisfying social order.  In practice, of course, the ideals of liberal democracy--equal liberty for all--have not been completely attained.  Nevertheless, even if we disagree about how best to achieve these ideals, most of us agree on the ideals themselves.  Never before has this happened, because in all previous history there were fundamental disagreements about what the ideal society would be like.  To be sure, there seems to be some resistance to liberal ideals in certain parts of the world today--Islamic fundamentalism, for example.  But Fukuyama argued that although such resistance can create a lot of international conflict, this will only delay the inevitable victory of liberal democracy around the world.

According to Fukuyama, there are two reasons for the triumph of liberal ideals.  First, liberalism satisfies the human desire for material security and comfort through economic productivity, free markets, and the scientific conquest of nature.  Second, liberalism satisfies the human desire for recognition through an egalitarian cultural and political order in which all human beings are recognized as equal in their moral dignity.  Thus, the history of human striving for satisfaction comes to an end when human beings discover that liberal democracy is the only social order that satisfies their deepest longings--the longing for material prosperity and the longing for moral recognition.

One can argue that the move towards this end of history began with the Declaration of Independence, because the Declaration began the American founding of a set of ideas and institutions that would constitute the liberal democratic national-state in the modern world.  These ideas and institutions would include a large nation-sized republic based on the principle of popular consent, a free market economy, a secular state without any official religion, and the rule of law that treated all citizens as equal.  The fundamental principle was that all human beings are by nature self-governing individuals who can organize their political, economic, religious, and legal orders through voluntary association.

In recent years, however, the rise of populist right-wing nationalism around the world has provoked a lot of public commentary about the decline or death of liberal democracy and the trends toward demagogic authoritarianism and nationalism.  Trump's meeting with Putin in Finland might confirm this fear with the image of the two most powerful strongmen in the world working together to break up the international liberal order.

But if one pulls back from these recent events and looks at the larger context of history over the past 250 years, one can see that the human progressive movement towards the liberal open society initiated in the Eighteenth century Enlightenment continues.  For example, Marian Tupy at the "HumanProgress" website of the Cato Institute has written an article showing some of the evidence that the progress of democracy around the world remains strong today.  In 1800, there were almost no liberal democracies anywhere in the world.  By 2016, there were 121 democracies.  There have been periods of deviation from this trend.  The rise of fascism, Nazism, and communism between the two world wars was one.  In the early 1970s, there were more autocratic regimes than democratic regimes.  But from 1989, the trend has been steadily rising in the spread of democracies around the world.  Moreover, as Tupy notes, the combined scores for autocracies, as measured by the Center for Systemic Peace, has dropped dramatically since 1989, while the combined scores for democracies has risen dramatically.  The quality of democracy has never been higher in human history.

Of course, these trends towards liberal democratic progress are not absolutely inevitable.  There could always be some deviation towards illiberal regimes as occurred between the two world wars.  But still the empirical historical evidence for liberal progress over the past 250 years is stunning.  (I have written a series of posts on human progress in November-December of 2016 and January of this year.)

To suggest that Donald Trump is going to reverse all of this is a ridiculous exaggeration of the power of that "most stable genius."

If this is true, how do we explain it?  What is it about the principles of the Declaration of Independence--the principles of modern liberalism--that made them so powerful that they have swept across the world over the past two centuries?

One possible explanation 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 anthropology might confirm this by showing that the social life of our hunting-gathering 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 others.  So the 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.

This kind of Darwinian liberal thinking is suggested--even if not fully elaborated--in the writings of people like Alexandra Maryanski, Jonathan Turner, Paul Rubin, and Christopher Boehm.

Some elaboration of this theme can be found in an earlier post here.

Nietzsche, Nazism, and the Alt-Right: Ronald Beiner's "Dangerous Minds"

            Adolf Hitler Staring at a Bust of Friedrich Nietzsche at the Nietzsche Archives

"Hail Trump!  Hail Our People!  Hail Victory!"

This was the famous exclamation of Richard Spencer at a gathering of the Alt-Right in Washington, DC, shortly after Donald Trump's electoral victory in 2016.  Paul Gottfried coined the term "Alternative Right" in 2008.  But Spencer claims to have originated the abbreviation "Alt-Right" in that year, and he has been one of the best known leaders of the Alt-Right movement as devoted to establishing what Spencer calls the "white ethnostate" for North America and Europe.  Spencer also claims to have originated the term "ethnostate," although this seems to be a variation on what Frank Salter has called the "ethnic state."  (At the bottom of this post, I've provided links to other posts on this and related topics.)

According to Spencer, this all started with Friedrich Nietzsche.  Spencer has said: "I was red-pilled by Nietzsche."  "Red-pilled" refers to a famous scene in the movie The Matrix, in which Keanu Reeves's character swallows a red pill that allows him to see that he and all of his fellow humans have been plugged into a delusional dream, and that he must free them from their dream.  So, to "red-pill" is the slang in the Alt-Right movement that refers to the moment when people see that all the ideals of liberal democracy--equality, liberty, pluralism, and peace--are delusional, and that the true reality of life is the racial and ethnic struggle for cultural dominance.  Spencer swallowed his red pill when he began reading Nietzsche as a college student at the University of Virginia, and then later as a graduate student at the University of Chicago, he began to study Leo Strauss, who he saw as sympathetic with fascist thinking. 

What he learned was that liberal egalitarian modernity was an expression of Christian slave morality as opposed to the master morality of Greek-Roman civilization, and that this slave morality was responsible for the decadence of Western culture as promoting the dehumanizing degradation of what Nietzsche called "the last man"--the man who lives an ignoble life of safe and comfortable pleasures with no aspiration for heroic achievement.  To overcome this decadence of liberalism, we need a new nobility of elite Supermen who can create an illiberal culture of pagan master morality in which the strong rule over the weak.

Now we have Ronald Beiner's new book--Dangerous Minds: Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the Return of the Far Right (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018)--in which he traces the intellectual history that runs from Nietzsche to Martin Heidegger to fascism and Nazism and, finally, to the recent resurgence of fascism in the Alt-Right and other illiberal authoritarian movements across Europe and Russia.

Beiner's argument for the intellectual links between Nietzsche, Heidegger, Nazism, and the newly resurgent fascist authoritarianism is persuasive.  A even more carefully detailed history of Nietzsche's place in the Third Reich is given by Steven Aschheim in Chapter 8 of his book The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany1890-1990 (University of California Press, 1992).  As Aschheim argues, it's an empirical fact of cultural history that Nietzsche was ideologically appropriated by Hitler and the Nazis as part of the official culture of the Third Reich.  But accepting this appropriation of Nietzsche by the Nazis as a fact of cultural history does not settle the question of whether their interpretation of Nietzsche was accurate or not.

Beiner rightly argues that even if the Nazi interpretation was mistaken, it was a misinterpretation that was promoted by Nietzsche himself in his most reckless writing.  Nietzsche said that the highest human being is the Dionysian artist-philosopher or Superman who exercises his will to power by tyrannically legislating new values for all of humanity.  He said that "slavery is . . . both in the cruder and in the more subtle sense, the indispensable means of spiritual discipline and breeding" (BGE, 188).  He said that the new nobility would require "merciless annihilation of everything that was degenerating and parasitical" (Ecce Homo, "Birth of Tragedy," 4).  He declared that European democracy must ultimately transform itself into "a new and sublime development of slavery," in which the "herd animal" is enslaved to the "leader animal" (Will to Power, 954, 956).  Thus, the democratization of Europe is "an involuntary arrangement for the breeding of tyrants--taking that word in every sense, including the most spiritual" (BGE, 242).  This tyrannical rule of the artist-philosophers will require "conscious breeding experiments," "terrible means of compulsion," and even "the annihilation of millions of failures."  This is necessary for the "domination of the earth" by a "new, tremendous aristocracy," in which "the will of philosophical men of power and artist-tyrants will be made to endure for millennia," and the "breeding of a new caste to rule over Europe" will unify it into "one will" (BGE, 208, 251; Will to Power, 764, 954, 960, 964).  "What is good? Everything that heightens the feeling of power in man, the will to power, power itself. What is bad? Everything that is born of weakness. . . . The weak and the failures shall perish: first principle of our love of man.  And they shall be given every possible assistance.  What is more harmful than any vice? Active pity for all the failures and all the weak: Christianity" (The Antichrist, 2).  There is plenty here to inspire Hitler, the Nazis, and the Alt-Right.

Moreover, as Beiner indicates, Nietzsche foresaw that this would happen.  In a letter (to Malwida von Meysenbug, June 1884), he wrote: "The sort of unqualified and utterly unsuitable people who may one day come to invoke my authority is a thought that fills me with dread.  Yet that is the torment of every great teacher of mankind: he knows that, given the circumstances and the accidents, he can become a disaster as well as a blessing to mankind."  Beiner asks: "Well, if Nietzsche was so terrified about this, why didn't he simply exercise more responsibility or more prudence about how he wrote?  There's no good answer to this question" (63).

But here I see the first of two weak points in Beiner's argument.  He speaks of the "insane recklessness" and "extreme lunacy" of Nietzsche's writing that attracts people like Hitler and Spencer (63).  But while Beiner sees this in the early and late writings of Nietzsche (28-34), he passes over the middle writings--particularly, Human, All Too Human and Dawn--in silence, and so he does not notice that the writings of Nietzsche's middle period do not show the "insane recklessness" and "extreme lunacy" of his other writings.

In fact, some of the Nazi writers who read Nietzsche carefully noticed that his middle writings contradicted Nazi ideology.  For example, Heinrich Hartle's Nietzsche and National Socialism (Nietzsche und der Nationalsozialismus) was an official Nazi book published by the central Nazi publishing house in 1937 and 1944.  Hartle argued that the National Socialists would have to separate those ideas in Nietzsche's books that supported Nazi ideology from those that did not; and in particular, the Nazis would have to reject the teachings in Nietzsche's middle writings that supported liberal democratic individualism rather than statist collectivist authoritarianism.

In many posts over the years, I have argued that Nietzsche's middle writings show a Darwinian aristocratic liberalism that contradicts the Dionysian aristocratic radicalism of his early and late writings, and it's only the latter that inspires the Nazis and the fascists.

In his middle writings, Nietzsche respects the freedom provided by liberal democracy, which includes freedom for "free spirits"--philosophers and scientists--to live their lives of intellectual inquiry without persecution, while also allowing the great multitude of people to live their lives free from tyrannical exploitation.  In contrast to his early and late writings, Nietzsche here sees liberal modernity as ennobling rather than degrading or dehumanizing.

Beiner ignores this, which leads him into what I see as the second weak point in his argument--he accepts the claim of Nietzsche in his later writings that liberalism necessarily leads to the decadence of the "last man," and he refuses to even consider the empirical evidence against this claim.

Beiner insists that life in liberal modernity is "profoundly dehumanizing" and "a profound contraction of the human spirit" (10).  In any liberal society, "the whole experience of life spirals down into unbearable shallowness and meaninglessness" (11).  He says that as a college student in Canada, he first read Nietzsche an "antidote to growing up amid the banality and conformism of suburban life in North America" (16).  The reason for all this degradation of life in Canada and all other liberal societies is that liberalism's "excessive openness and the exploding of fixed horizons" creates "horizonlessness" (25, 28).  Consequently, there is "a form of life where privileged horizons, horizons that sustain a definite understanding of the point of existence, have ceased to exist" (35).  This brings "spiritlessness" and "a total extermination and uprooting of culture," so that culture as such becomes impossible (30, 34, 144).  No one in a liberal society can escape this "spiritual void," because "everyone suffers from this horizonlessness" (38, 132).  So life becomes meaningless for everyone who lives in a liberal society.  It is therefore easy to understand the popular appeal of Nietzschean fascists and Nazis who offer what Heidegger called "spiritual renewal."

So while Beiner thinks that Nietzsche's "solutions" for the problem of liberal decadence are "all nonsense or lunacy," he also thinks that Nietzsche's "cultural diagnosis" of the problem is "not nonsense" (24).  This leads to Beiner's final conclusion at the end of his book: "I don't rule out the possibility that Nietzsche and Heidegger successfully articulate aspects of spiritual or cultural vacuity in the liberal egalitarian dispensation that defines modernity.  But what they offer by way of new dispensations to supplant spiritless modernity is far worse" (134). 

Well, if the illiberal alternatives to liberalism are far worse, then doesn't that mean that liberalism is better?  But how can liberalism be better if it only promotes "spiritual or cultural vacuity"?

And what should we say about poor Professor Beiner at the University of Toronto whose whole life has been meaningless because of the "spiritlessness" of Canadian liberal society?  Not only has he been forced to live the life of the "last man," he has learned from reading Nietzsche that he is a "last man" living a despicably degraded life, and so he must suffer from self-loathing.  Or does his capacity for self-loathing show that he is not a "last man"?

I don't believe that Beiner and all of his fellow Canadians have lived meaningless or spiritless lives, because I don't believe that a liberal society like Canada forces everyone to become Nietzsche's "last man."  I see no way to settle this disagreement between me and Beiner except by looking at the factual evidence of how people live in liberal societies to see if they live well or badly.  Amazingly, however, Beiner never offers any factual evidence to support his claim that everyone in a liberal society suffers from a meaningless or spiritless life.  In this way, his rhetorical strategy is exactly the same as other recent critics of liberalism--like Steven Smith and Patrick Dineen--who cite the claims of anti-liberal cultural critics that liberal bourgeois modernity is dehumanizing, and then assume the truth of those claims without considering any of the relevant empirical evidence.

In some of my previous posts, I have surveyed the empirical evidence that the Liberal Enlightenment has promoted human progress by fostering the good character--the moral and intellectual virtues or what Deirdre McCloskey calls the "bourgeois virtues"--that promote human happiness or flourishing.  For example, one can see the correlation between the Human Freedom Index and the World Happiness Report, which shows that liberal regimes tend to be high in both freedom and happiness, and the illiberal regimes tend to be low in both freedom and happiness.

In Enlightenment Now, Steven Pinker argues for the stunning success of the Liberal Enlightenment as shown by massive factual evidence (conveyed in 73 charts of statistical data) of human progress over the past 200 years: because of liberalism today more human beings are living longer, healthier, wealthier, freer, safer, more stimulating, and generally happier lives than human beings have ever lived in any time in history.

Beiner is silent about all of this evidence for the flourishing of human life in liberal societies. 

He is also silent about the evidence of social history that denies his claim that in liberal societies, it is impossible for people to live in moral communities with "horizons that sustain a definite understanding of the point of human existence" (35).  Consider, for example, the social history of voluntary religious communities like the Amish, the Hasidic Jews, or the Mormons, who have become some of the fastest growing religious groups in the United States.  Beiner suggests that the only way to have "viable horizons" is through "legislating authoritative horizons whose only authority is the act of legislation itself" (57).  But groups like the Amish illustrate how in liberal societies moral and religious horizons arise in families and voluntary associations (churches, schools, clubs, friendships, and so on) without being coercively legislated.  In liberal societies, people can always exercise "The Benedict Option" (as Rod Dreher calls it)--they can form self-governing communities of people dedicated to some shared vision of moral or religious excellence.  The importance of such character formation for liberal political theorists is evident, for example, in texts such as John Locke's Some Thoughts Concerning Education and Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments.

The evidence of social history also shows that liberal societies provide the intellectual freedom of thought that cultivates the life of the mind in philosophy and science.  Beiner seems deny this by agreeing with Heidegger that part of the shallowness of life in a modern liberal society is that people are distracted from plumbing the depths of the mysterious question of Being--why is there something rather than nothing?  Thus, people do not engage in the "heroic thinking" that constitutes true philosophy (70-91).  But, in fact, Heidegger's question of Being--of why or how something comes from nothing--has become a fundamental question for modern philosophy and science--particularly in response to the scientific theory of the Big Bang as the origin of everything from nothing.

Beiner is also silent about the evidence of political history that shows the spirited heroism of liberal societies.  He speaks about the emotional appeal of Hitler's heroism (130-31), but he says nothing about the liberal heroism of Winston Churchill in leading Great Britain to resist and finally defeat Hitler.

The history of liberalism is to a large extent the history of spirited resistance to tyranny and courage in war.  The Declaration of Independence was a declaration of Lockean liberalism that was also a declaration of war.  The American Civil War under the heroic leadership of Abraham Lincoln became a test of whether people in a liberal society were courageous enough to fight and die for the emancipation of slaves and a "new birth of freedom."

In Great Britain, John Stuart Mill saw Lincoln's leadership in the war as a vindication of the moral heroism of people in a free society.  In "The Contest in America" (1862), Mill wrote:

"I cannot join with those who cry Peace, peace.  I cannot wish that this war should not have been engaged in by the North . . . . War, in a good cause, is not the greatest evil which a nation can suffer.  War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks nothing worth a war, is worse.  When a people are used as mere human instruments for firing cannon or thrusting bayonets, in the service and for the selfish purposes of a master, such war degrades a people.  A war to protect other human beings against tyrannical injustice; a war to give victory to their own ideas of right and good, and which is their own war, carried on for an honest purpose by their free choice--is often the means of their regeneration.  A man who has nothing which he is willing to fight for, nothing which he cares more about than he does about his personal safety, is a miserable creature, who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.  As long as justice and injustice have not terminated their ever renewing fight for ascendancy in the affairs of mankind, human beings must be willing, when need is, to do battle for the one against the other."

This doesn't sound like the degraded and meaningless life of the "last man."


Here are links to some of my posts that elaborate some of my points here:

Nietzsche's middle period:  here, here, here, here, here, and here

Nazi philosophers:  here and here

The Alt-Right ethnic state:  here, and here,

Leo Strauss and Nazism: here and here

Patrick Dineen and the Amish:  here and here

Rod Dreher and the Benedict Option: here

Steven Smith:  here and here

Deirdre McCloskey and the bourgeois virtues:  here, here, and here

Steven Pinker and liberal progress:  here and here

The Human Freedom Index: here

Empirical Human Progress through the Liberal Enlightenment: here

Heidegger's question of something from nothing:  here and here