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The (very) long run trend of human history Having neither the time nor the energy left to do a properly thoughtful posting, but still wanting to do a posting, what with everyone else here seeming to be out having a life, I went looking. And eventually I found this intriguingly quasi-optimistic thought, in a comment from someone called David Tomlin on this David Friedman piece.
The long run (very long run) trend of human history has been toward greater liberty.
In five or ten thousand years, if the human race still exists, I expect most people will be living in anarchist or minarchist societies, and other societies will be considered backward, as dictatorships are today.
Perhaps that is more like a thought for Easter Sunday rather than for Good Friday, but the times are depressing enough already.
Personally, I don’t see why such improvement need take as long as those kinds of numbers. I reckon a thousand years ought to be plenty.
Further thoughts from me, about the cogitations of another member of the Friedman dynasty, here.
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We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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I am willing to balieve that Friedman is correct………. So long as a truly devastating KT sized asteroid doesn’t come along unforseen and hurl us all back into a dark ages existence.
Another note:
I think what serves liberty more then most things is the fact thatc reality always prevails over any sort of ignorant beliefs and actions. It can only be ignored for so long. Since the beliefs and actions of most political movements and their elites are philosophically so far from reality as to be on the other side of the moon, their failure is highly probable. Liberty wins because it imposes the least preconceptions upon the nature of the world and how it works.
Stephan: Although every foolish ideological tide ultimately crashes against the the rocks of underlying reality, the problem is that the evolutionary psychology of our species is no less immutable at least over culturally relevant timespans. Libertarianism as a political movement has been held back at least in large part because it has proved profoundly counterintuitive to nearly all people in all cultures throughout human history. Getting effective but counterintuitive solutions adopted in democracies is by no means an easy feat.
I am by no means a nihilist but I think I will reserve judgement over the historic inevitability of our triumph.
Jay Thomas,
Quite. Oh dear.
I’m afraid, Brian, it is not a quasi-optimistic thought, but a quasi-idiotic one. You would (I hope) laugh at a green who claimed it was inevitable that the world would one day be inhabited by sustainable permaculture communities organised into bioregions, or at a primitive Marxist who didn’t just cant about “late capitalism” but explicitly announced the inevitability of the proletarian revolution.
I’d have said one good reason for being libertarian is that orientation is meliorist, not millennarian. Our key claim is not to have all the answers, but that people are entitled to choose different answers and that society should rationally be ordered to let them. It is possible that institutions and societies will be changed, and that liberal philosophies of government may prosper in some places in the future. But there is absolutely no reason to suppose that they will.
There are some urgent questions that libertarians of all strains need to answer: What are the preconditions for the survival or re-emergence of personal and common liberty? How can they be preserved and extended? How can liberal institutions be sustained and strengthened? They are practical questions and assume we are responsible agents, ready to engage with the world of men, not self-exiled political hermits, and not surfers on the tide of history.
The tide comes in; it also goes out. Breakers break. The shore changes its fractal shape, but it does not disappear.
A pragmatic revolutionary, a man who had taken his courage and wisdom and changed the world – and therefore I suspect a wiser man than David Tomlin – wrote on the millennarian philosophising of his own times: “in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes”.
Funnily enough, the time-scale mentioned fits in quite nicely with the words of Shakyamuni Buddha – the fat Buddha of statue and word religion fame.
The Indian societal roots of the man meant that they (and he) talk in imprecise terms when it comes to time. This is partly due to the relatively low importance applied to that concept by that society.
But he talks about a time, many years after now, when humans will live in relative peace with each other. This enormous span, I think, was his recognition that a fundamental darkness affects all humanity and will take a long time to redress or ‘cure’.
This future will be a humanitarian time – so; humanitarian, libertarian – they’re both similar shades of the same thing, aren’t they?
In the real world, I’m an impatient Buddhist who believes in making and striving for these changes now, so I’m closer to your time-scale with that one!
The long run (very long run) trend of human history has been toward greater liberty.
Has it? When you think of ancient times, they’re full of stories of people just wandering about doing their own thing, getting on ships and going places, even Jesus wandering around the Israeli countryside holding impromptu get-togethers without anyone knowing what he was up to. Part of the problem with analysing economic history was the lack of interest in record keeping, because people just did stuff no official bodies knew about, largely because states hadn’t the technocratic apparatus to know about them. If Joseph, Mary and Jesus tried a surreptitious flight to Egypt these days, they’d get no further than customs.
We live in societies now with larger governments, more laws and more state intervention in many respects than have ever before existed before. I don’t see any trend towards anarchism or liberty at the moment, and pushing it thousands of years into the future pushes it into the realm of the entirely unknown unknowns.
The trend towards liberty in the west halted and reversed a century ago, when liberalism was beaten by statism. The US federal system, with a minimal central government and states’ and citizens’ rights began decaying the moment it was implemented, and only shreds of it now remain. The trend is towards control, not freedom.
a good article……
Stephan,
It might not take an asteroid. Our glorious leaders seem to be hell-bent on achieving the same result.
Jay Thomas,
“every foolish ideological tide ultimately crashes against the the rocks of underlying reality,” only if people are able to recognize a) that there IS a thing called REALITY, and b) are able to recognize it when they see it. At the moment, the illusionists seem to be winning the popularity stakes.
An example of the illusionists who appear to be winning the “debate”: Be Careful What you Wish For by Peter Schiff: (Link)
What I am seeing here looks a lot like the triumph of hope over experience. Long run, the safest bet is that humanity will be living in poverty under some form of dictatorship.
People are inherently competitive, and as long as “it’s good to be the king”, there will be people trying very hard to get there.
The happiest scenarios are all based on people seeing becoming, say, a captain of industry as being better than becoming king. Good luck with that.
I don’t think it’s true either that a past historical trend is predictive for the future or that there is a general trend towards liberty.
The Greek and Roman republics, despite being slave-owning and otherwise flawed, preceded 1-1.5 millennia in which almost the whole populace were slaves and government was monarchical and divine.
This was followed by a period of perhaps 200 years from 17xx-1914 in which much of Europe and her New World offspring reached the pinnacle of human liberty. The rest of the world is essentially irrelevant in that it has never produced any significant free civilisation other than by European or American interference.
The revolt against liberty suffered a major setback when most of the fascist states were destroyed in the second world war, but the communists remained and grew, and while they have also collapsed, the general trend towards totalitarianism in the West has not stopped.
I think the 20th century has actually seen the greatest totalitarianism the world has ever seen, albeit also with freer countries that in most of history alongside them. Most of the ancient dictatorships lacked both the technological capability ideological will to intervene in many areas of the private sphere which today are considered fair game even in the ‘free West’.
The future is certainly ours for the taking, but it’s by no means progressing in our favoured direction. It may even be going the opposite direction. Historicism is a dangerous game to play.
Friedmann ignores the imposition of increasing regulation at every level. Perhaps it’s because I remember a time when there were no housing associations to regulate the color of your paint, a time when a local government couldn’t seize your property to sell to another private individual, a time when their were no forfeiture laws and you could carry a large sum of cash through an airport without fear of having it seized. Friedman is just wrong. The western world certainly lives in a time of more stability but to conclude we are moving toward more freedom is naive at best. What we have done is distribute what freedoms we have, at least in the west, equitably while at the same time restricting the freedoms of everyone.
For the long run, we have to take technological advance into account. There are a few advances that SF authors have been looking at for a while which will have large impacts on the type of society that may evolve.
Life extension, (maybe functional immortality), will have profound effects, but will they favour liberty?
Atomic level fabricators that produce anything you might want or need from rubbish could happen, but society will surely impose strict limits on what can be fabricated.
Personal computing/communication, either wearable, ala Vernor Vinge, or implanted, will bring forth new definitions of privacy, both from each other and the state.
Then there’s space exploration. Building habitats in space will offer the best chance for competing political systems to evolve, but inter-state rivalries will probabily continue in near space. Maybe taking one’s libertarian habitat and zooming, (or plodding), off round the galaxy might be best.
Then there’s the downside. Asteroids are not the only potential civilization stopper out there. John Ringo deals amusingly with killer flu and a mini ice-age. Then there’s Coronal Mass Ejections. Though personally I think that the CME panic might be a bit overwrought, (our infrastructure is probably harder to destroy than predicted), the effect of wiping out the electricity grid for however long it takes to replace the big transformers would be pretty serious.
Myself, I figure an upcoming dark age is due followed by a shift from a western enlightenment basis for civilization to some other foundation.
How will society evolve based on a Chinese or Indian template?
Will someone out there please get the life extension thing going. I really want to see what happens.
I think the point is that he is saying it is “long term” and by that meaning longer than “Since the last major leap in liberty”. Advancements in liberty tend to come in short, violent actions (Magna Carta, American Revolution) whereas encroachments upon liberty tend to be much slower and over longer periods. The thesis presumably being that each advancement tends to restore liberty to a greater degree than that lost to the periods in between.
Of course, there is no guarantee that any given revolution will be beneficial to liberty but if nothing else, at least it tends to put the more pernicious activities of government out of action for a while. Given what I see around me, particularly with advances in technology, I am cautiously optimistic.
Old Polish proverb:
“Under capitalism man exploits man; under socialism the reverse is true.”
I don’t have anything clever to say, just wanted to share this quote I just found.
When you look at government action only it may seem as though the world is getting less free. But at the same time there is an increase in liberty that comes about not by governments relinquishing control but by private action. As we get wealthier, we get freer: Is it not a tremendous boon to liberty that almost anyone can send messages around the globe in a matter of seconds? that increasing numbers of people can devote a substantial part of their time to something other than mere subsistence? that the once devastating effects of epidemics and famines are now most limited in scope? that the thought opening up new frontiers by colonizing the high seas and space seems less absurd by the day? God bless the 1830’s, but I for one am glad I was born in the late 1980’s…
And as others have said before me, even governments can’t ignore reality forever. Soviet socialism collapsed, and so will democratic socialism, giving way to a more liberal order. These sudden shifts in the directions of liberty are rare, but they do happen.
“The long run (very long run) trend of human history has been toward greater liberty”
I think it’s much too early to tell. For pretty much all of human history except the last hundred-odd years we’ve mostly been worrying about whether we’d get enough to eat and whether the strangers from the next village/valley/country would attack us.
Britain’s been an exception – we haven’t had to worry much about the strangers for three hundred-odd years, with a few short intervals, until very recently.
And it all depends on what liberty means. We were pretty free as hunter gatherers – always taking into account the above concerns.
A few points—
Liberty of the kind we speak of today in a libertarian context is a fluke. It is the result of the interaction of some very distinctive historical and intellectual trends in western european culture, which led to the discovery and settlement of an entire new world.
Even though the colonizers generally tried to duplicate their authoritarian home systems, it was complicated by the various contending powers waxing and waning over the course of time. Fortunately, the British legacy has, for the most part, resulted in more liberty than the others. The Spanish, French, et al, not so much.
But the critical factor in the most prominent cases, i.e., North America and Australia, is the simple fact that these areas were so large and undeveloped that social controls of the old world type were impossible as long as people could easily move on and escape them.
The truest ally of liberty is economic wealth, and the rise of the middle class of tradesmen and artisans, able to support themselves and educate their children as once was possible only for the aristocracy, was a major driving factor in the demand for liberty in the crucial areas of religious belief, political speech, and taxation only by elected representatives.
It is no accident that the middle class is so loathed and repressed by collectivists and authoritarians of all kinds—the man who earns his own honest living by talents and skills honestly learned and used has little need for the “man on a white horse” to tell him what to do at every turn.
The exception to the above rule is when there is a major crisis which threatens most everyone with death, destruction, and impoverishment in some combination or another. Then, the almost instinctual reaction of very many people is to look for a savior, and not quibble too much about the niceties as long as he succeeds in resolving the emergency.
One of the reasons that statists are so anxious to declare war on each other, or, in the modern idiom, on some social problem, is that the “crisis” status allows them to bypass all sorts of barriers that liberal democratic states have attempted to use to prevent the accumulation of too much power by any man or small group of people.
We are where we are in the west because an endless series of crises, nearly all traceable back to the relentless maneuverings of one group of collectivists or another, have worn down the intellectual, moral, and social barriers that attempted to block the statists’ usurpations.
It is now acceptable and unremarkable to the great majority of people that governments may regulate and control large parts of the lives of private citizens.
The statists who used to declare war on some other king or emperor to enhance their prestige and glory can now accomplish even more accumulation of power and wealth by declaring war on poverty or drugs or pollution, thereby acquiring an enormous range of new powers through new laws and regulations, all without the threat of actually losing to another militarily and being deposed, exiled, or executed.
Ideas have serious and lasting consequences. For far too long, the realms of intellectual theorizing and ethical moralizing have been left to those for whom the liberty of the individual is an impediment, and a flaw, not a goal as high or higher than any other.
My daughter just gave birth to my first grandchild this weekend. How he is educated, and what he is taught about right and value, will determine, in the aggregate, the future of this culture.
He is one day old. I have already whispered in his ear…
Mazal Tov!
Congratulations to her and to all of you! If you have a strong role in helping him form his value system, the future has just gotten a little brighter.
BTW, does this mean you will be dropping “re” from the middle of your blog name? 🙂
TY Mid and Alisa for your kind thoughts. I’m not going back to work, they have to pay for him, not me.
Besides, I get the grampa duty, which consists of fun stuff until they cry or poop, then it’s “Here, you better take him.”
I doubt I will miss either my morning or afternoon nap very often.
As I write this, he’s getting dressed to go home from Easter dinner, including the little hat with bunny ears his gramma got him. Picture time!
From the article:
An alternative, for academics, authors, newspaper columnists, anyone able to produce ideas and information and put them into circulation, is to try to alter the mix of free information that drives the coarse control mechanism of democracy.
These are precisely the people most responsible for eroding liberty, at least in the US. I find laughable the entire premise of the article. Liberty is a transitory thing – it’s a battle never won or completely lost.
Whilst I hope Liberty expands, I have no hope that Space is the answer. Far too often, we read about space colonies being beacons of hope, but I think they’ll become bureaucratic dystopias, instead. Or bureaucratic welfare communes.
After all, if colonizing a place like Mars, you’re hardly likely to be doing it alone! You’d go up as part of a crew, with a role. You wouldn’t be the hardy pioneer type! Not until the second generation, and even they wouldn’t be loners! Future colonies would be a bit like Japan, with lines of authority, with the emphasis on group survival.