Human Progress Confounds -isms

It should not be surprising that the facts of human progress confound the major -isms. The ideologies are more than two centuries old and are based on mile-high visions such as whether humans are tragically flawed or infinitely malleable, and whether society is an organic whole or a collection of individuals.43 A real society comprises hundreds of millions of social beings, each with a trillion-synapse brain, who pursue their well-being while affecting the well-being of others in complex networks with massive positive and negative externalities, many of them historically unprecedented. It is bound to defy any simple narrative of what will happen under a given set of rules. A more rational approach to politics is to treat societies as ongoing experiments and open-mindedly learn the best practices, whichever part of the spectrum they come from. The empirical picture at present suggests that people flourish most in liberal democracies with a mixture of civic norms, guaranteed rights, market freedom, social spending, and judicious regulation. As Pat Paulsen noted, “If either the right wing or the left wing gained control of the country, it would fly around in circles.”

It’s not that Goldilocks is always right and that the truth always falls halfway between extremes. It’s that current societies have winnowed out the worst blunders of the past, so if a society is functioning halfway decently—if the streets aren’t running with blood, if obesity is a bigger problem than malnutrition, if the people who vote with their feet are clamoring to get in rather than racing for the exits—then its current institutions are probably a good starting point (itself a lesson we can take from Burkean conservatism). Reason tells us that political deliberation would be most fruitful if it treated governance more like scientific experimentation and less like an extreme-sports competition.