I had a very interesting conversation the other day with a young gentleman. His question was whether the world was really progressing and if so to what degree. He was aware that the
sturm and drang of any given moment always obfuscates reality. But to what degree? The message is always that the world is going to hell in a hand basket, that the younger generation aren't up to the task, and that the old days were the golden days. But is that true?
It is a topic on which I have read and thought a great deal. On virtually every socio-econometric measure one might alight upon, it is relatively straightforward to demonstrate that in empirical terms, everyone, everywhere, is dramatically better off today than a hundred years ago, seventy-five years ago, fifty years ago, even twenty-five years ago. And not by only a few percent. Dramatically better.
Longer lives, healthier lives, wealthier lives, better educated lives, safer lives. Fifty years ago, most the world was still living under authoritarian regimes (communist states, one-party states, military juntas, a single person dictators). The few members of the OECD worried about that nest of calamities.
They are mostly gone now. Most states aspire to at least the appearance of some version of a Classical Liberal state. Still plenty to worry about as they progress by fits and starts into consent-based forms of government and market economies, but the direction of progress is obvious. Instead of those dozens of communist states, dictatorships etc., now we worry about a handful of failed states (Haiti, Somalia, Afghanistan) or near failed states (Syria, Sri Lanka, several in Africa).
In 1975 we still worried about nuclear proliferation, famines, multiple active wars, civil wars, genocide (Cambodia), and grotesque repressions. Now? We have Ukraine and Russia, plus a handful of smoldering areas of India, Philippines and elsewhere.
It is indeed intriguing why there is such a pervasive gloom about progress among institutional players when the empirical reality is so obviously good. Lots of good conversation and speculation to be had.
I am convinced that the global progress has been achieved by the spread of the central attributes of Age of Enlightenment thinking and Classical Liberal Values. The confidence in a knowable world via the scientific method, reason and logic. Natural Rights, Rule of Law, Equality before the Law, Due Process, Consent of the governed, Individualism, Property Rights, Limited Government, etc.
Everywhere that the core elements of Age of Enlightenment thinking and Classical Liberal Values have spread, prosperity and beneficence has followed. Absent Age of Enlightenment thinking and Classical Liberal Values, corruption, violence, disease, and stagnation remain the Hobbesian state of nature.
The conversation was recalled to mind by some opening passages in Founding Fathers by Joseph J. Ellis.
Several other prominent American revolutionaries also talked as if they were actors in a historical drama whose script had already been written by the gods. In his old age, John Adams recalled his youthful intimations of the providential forces at work: “There is nothing … more ancient in my memory,” he wrote in 1807, “than the observation that arts, sciences, and empire had always travelled westward. And in conversation it was always added, since I was a child, that their next leap would be over the Atlantic into America.” Adams instructed his beloved Abigail to start saving all his letters even before the outbreak of the war for independence. Then in June of 1776, he purchased “a Folio Book” to preserve copies of his entire correspondence in order to record, as he put it, “the great Events which are passed, and those greater which are rapidly advancing.” Of course we tend to remember only the prophets who turn out to be right, but there does seem to have been a broadly shared sense within the revolutionary generation that they were “present at the creation.”
These early premonitions of American destiny have been reinforced and locked into our collective memory by the subsequent triumph of the political ideals the American Revolution first announced, as Jefferson so nicely put it, “to a candid world.” Throughout Asia, Africa, and Latin America, former colonies of European powers have won their independence with such predictable regularity that colonial status has become an exotic vestige of bygone days, a mere way station for emerging nations. The republican experiment launched so boldly by the revolutionary generation in America encountered entrenched opposition in the two centuries that followed, but it thoroughly vanquished the monarchical dynasties of the nineteenth century and then the totalitarian despotisms of the twentieth, just as Jefferson predicted it would. Though it seems somewhat extreme to declare, as one contemporary political philosopher has phrased it, that “the end of history” is now at hand, it is true that all alternative forms of political organization appear to be fighting a futile rearguard action against the liberal institutions and ideas first established in the United States in the late eighteenth century. At least it seems safe to say that some form of representative government based on the principle of popular sovereignty and some form of market economy fueled by the energies of individual citizens have become the commonly accepted ingredients for national success throughout the world. These legacies are so familiar to us, we are so accustomed to taking their success for granted, that the era in which they were born cannot help but be remembered as a land of foregone conclusions.
Indeed. Americans, well, really, everyone, tend to overlook that the American Revolution, Janus-like, had two faces. The common story is that of the fractious colonies rebelling against monarchical mother Britain and succeeding almost by mere chance and against the odds in gaining their independence.
What is overlooked is what was obvious at the time (and which Ellis covers well) - the Americans were not just rebelling against, but were actively revolutionizing. They were consciously seeking to birth the first manifestations of Age of Enlightenment thinking and Classical Liberal Values embodied in a constitutional republic; a nation of laws not men. That was the Revolution. Not the fighting that brought it about but the Revolution in the concept of individual man, natural rights, government, and consent. What was brought forth with the Constitution was an entirely new concept of how a nation could be governed that was alien to everything that went before.
At that time there were four proto- or actual Classical Liberal, Age of Enlightenment revolutions. Only the American one succeeded. It was rare and uncertain but once it got out of the nursery, it changed the world.
Portugal looked like it might be headed towards a Classical Liberal model until the
Lisbon Earthquake of 1755. The response to the catastrophe reverted everything back to a monarchical, centralized decision-making model.
Then there was, of course, the
French Revolution beginning in 1789. A domestic revolution that ended up in class warfare, slaughter, and global war under a military dictatorship.
Finally, there was the
Haitian Revolution of 1791 which was infused with Classical Liberal ideas but which quickly collapsed into genocide.
The American Revolution, both as a war for independence but even more as a Revolution in the concept of governance, survived and indeed revolutionized everything. The Classical Liberal Model and Age of Enlightenment worldview is everywhere the default aspiration, though never explicitly so. From a world virtually entirely composed of non-consensual all powerful monarchs, warlords, theocrats in 1775 to where we are today, the progress is immense and inescapable.
More progress needed and there is always a risk of backsliding but obvious progress to anyone who can break free from the cacophony of fear mongers.
