Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

Fukuyama coined a runaway meme: in the decades since his essay appeared, books and articles have announced “the end of” nature, science, faith, poverty, reason, money, men, lawyers, illness, the free market, and sex. But Fukuyama also became a punching bag as editorialists, commenting on the latest bit of bad news, gleefully announced “the return of history” and the rise of alternatives to democracy such as theocracy in the Muslim world and authoritarian capitalism in China. Democracies themselves appeared to be backsliding into authoritarianism with populist victories in Poland and Hungary and power grabs by Recep Erdogan in Turkey and Vladimir Putin in Russia (the return of the sultan and the czar). Historical pessimists, with their customary schadenfreude, announced that the third wave of democratization had given way to an “undertow,” “recession,” “erosion,” “rollback,” or “meltdown.”⁹ Democratization, they said, was a conceit of Westerners projecting their tastes onto the rest of the world, whereas authoritarianism seemed to suit most of humanity just fine.

Could recent history really imply that people are happy to be brutalized by their governments? The very idea is doubtful for two reasons. Most obviously, in a country that is not democratic, how could you tell? The pent-up demand for democracy might be enormous, but no one dares express it lest they be jailed or shot. The other is the headline fallacy: crackdowns make the news more often than liberalizations, and the Availability bias could make us forget about all the boring countries that become democratic bit by bit.

As always, the only way to know which way the world is going is to quantify. This raises the question of what counts as a “democracy,” a word that has developed such an aura of goodness as to have become almost meaningless. A good rule of thumb is that any country that has the word “democratic” in its official name, like the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (a.k.a. North Korea) or the German Democratic Republic (a.k.a. East Germany), isn’t one. Nor is it helpful to ask the citizens of undemocratic states what they think the word means: almost half think it means “The army takes over when the government is incompetent” or “Religious leaders ultimately interpret the laws.”¹⁰ Ratings by experts have a related problem when their checklists embrace a hodgepodge of good things such as “freedom from socioeconomic inequalities” and “freedom from war.”¹¹ Yet another complication is that countries vary continuously in the different components of democracy such as freedom of speech, the openness of the political process, and the constraints on its leaders’ power, so any tally that dichotomizes nations into “democracies” and “autocracies” will fluctuate from year to year depending on arbitrary choices about where to place the countries that hover near the boundary (a problem exacerbated when the raters’ standards rise over time, a phenomenon we will return to).¹² The Polity Project deals with these obstacles by using a fixed set of criteria to assign a score between –10 and 10 to every country in every year indicating how autocratic or democratic it is, focusing on citizens’ ability to express political preferences, constraints on the power of the executive, and a guarantee of civil liberties.¹³ The sum for the world since 1800, spanning the three waves of democratization, is shown in figure 14-1.

Figure 14-1: Democracy versus autocracy, 1800–2015

Source:HumanProgress, http://humanprogress.org/f1/2560, based on Polity IV Annual Time-Series, 1800–2015, Marshall, Gurr, & Jaggers 2016. Scores are summed over sovereign states with a population greater than 500,000, and range from –10 for a complete autocracy to 10 for a perfect democracy. The arrow points to 2008, the last year plotted in fig. 5–23 of Pinker 2011.