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

Ideas matter, too. For democracy to take root, influential people (particularly people with guns) have to think that it is better than alternatives such as theocracy, the divine right of kings, colonial paternalism, the dictatorship of the proletariat (in practice, its “revolutionary vanguard”), or authoritarian rule by a charismatic leader who directly embodies the will of the people. This helps explain other patterns in the annals of democratization, such as why democracy is less likely to take root in countries with less education, in countries that are remote from Western influence (such as in Central Asia), and in countries whose regimes were born of violent, ideologically driven revolutions (such as China, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, and Vietnam).²⁸ Conversely, as people recognize that democracies are relatively nice places to live, the idea of democracy can become contagious and the number can increase over time.

The freedom to complain rests on an assurance that the government won’t punish or silence the complainer. The front line in democratization, then, is constraining the government from abusing its monopoly on force to brutalize its uppity citizens.

A series of international agreements beginning with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 drew red lines around thuggish governmental tactics, particularly torture, extrajudicial killings, the imprisonment of dissidents, and the ugly transitive verb coined during the Argentinian military regime of 1974–84, to disappear someone. These red lines are not the same as electoral democracy, since a majority of voters may be indifferent to government brutality as long as it isn’t directed at them. In practice, democratic countries do show greater respect for human rights.²⁹ But the world also has some benevolent autocracies, like Singapore, and some repressive democracies, like Pakistan. This leads to a key question about whether the waves of democratization are really a form of progress. Has the rise in democracy brought a rise in human rights, or are dictators just using elections and other democratic trappings to cover their abuses with a smiley-face?

The US State Department, Amnesty International, and other organizations have monitored violations of human rights over the decades. If one were to look at their numbers since the 1970s, it would appear that governments are as repressive as ever—despite the spread of democracy, human rights norms, international criminal courts, and the watchdog organizations themselves. This has led to pronouncements (delivered with alarm by rights activists and with glee by cultural pessimists) that we have reached “the endtimes of human rights,” “the twilight of human rights law,” and, of course, “the post–human rights world.”³⁰

But progress has a way of covering its tracks. As our moral standards rise over the years, we become alert to harms that would have gone unnoticed in the past. Moreover, activist organizations feel they must always cry “crisis” to keep the heat up (though the strategy can backfire, implying that decades of activism have been a waste of time). The political scientist Kathryn Sikkink calls this the information paradox: as human rights watchdogs admirably look harder for abuse, look in more places for abuse, and classify more acts as abuse, they find more of it—but if we don’t compensate for their keener powers of detection, we can be misled into thinking that there is more abuse to detect.³¹

The political scientist Christopher Fariss has cut this knot with a mathematical model that compensates for more dogged reporting over time and estimates the actual amount of human rights abuse in the world. Figure 14-2 shows his scores for four countries from 1949 to 2014 and for the world as a whole. The graph displays numbers spat out by a mathematical model, so we should not take the exact values too seriously, but they do indicate differences and trends. The top line is for a country that represents a gold standard for human rights. As with most measures of human flourishing, it is Scandinavian, in this case Norway, and it started high and has grown higher. We see diverging lines for the two Koreas: North, which started low and sank even lower, and South, which rose from a right-wing autocracy during the Cold War into positive territory today. In China, human rights hit bottom during the Cultural Revolution, shot up after the death of Mao, and crested during the 1980s democracy movement before the government cracked down after the Tiananmen Square protests, though they are still well above the Maoist-era lowlands. But the most significant curve is the one for the world as a whole: for all its setbacks, the arc of human rights bends upward.

Figure 14-2: Human rights, 1949–2014