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

Let’s first look at the history of the most developed nations, such as those of North America, Western Europe, and Japan. Figure 15-6 shows the trajectory of emancipative values over a span of a century. It plots survey data collected from adults (ranging in age from eighteen to eighty-five), at two periods (1980 and 2005), representing cohorts born between 1895 and 1980. (American cohorts are commonly divided into the GI Generation, born between 1900 and 1924; the Silent Generation, 1925–45; the Baby Boomers, 1946–64; Generation X, 1965–79; and the Millennials, 1980–2000.) The cohorts are arranged along the horizontal axis by birth year; each of the two testing years is plotted on a line. (Data from 2011 to 2014, which extend the series to late Millennials born through 1996, are similar to those of 2005.)

The graph displays a historical trend that is seldom appreciated in the hurly-burly of political debate: for all the talk about right-wing backlashes and angry white men, the values of Western countries have been getting steadily more liberal (which, as we will see, is one of the reasons those men are so angry).³⁸ The line for 2005 is higher than the line for 1980 (showing that everyone got more liberal over time), and both curves rise from left to right (showing that younger generations in both periods were more liberal than older generations). The rises are substantial: about three-quarters of a standard deviation apiece for the twenty-five years of passing time and for each twenty-five-year generation. (The rises are also unappreciated: a 2016 Ipsos poll showed that in almost every developed country, people think their compatriots are more socially conservative than they really are.)³⁹ A critical discovery displayed in the graph is that the liberalization does not reflect a growing bulge of liberal young people who will backslide into conservatism as they get older. If that were true, the two curves would sit side by side instead of one floating above the other, and a vertical line representing a given cohort would impale the 2005 curve at a lower value, reflecting conservative old age, rather than the higher value we see, reflecting the more liberal zeitgeist. Young people take their emancipative values with them as they age, a finding we’ll return to when we ponder the future of progress in chapter 20.⁴⁰

Figure 15-6: Liberal values across time and generations, developed countries, 1980–2005

Source: Welzel 2013, fig. 4.1. World Values Survey data are from Australia, Canada, France, West Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States (each country weighted equally).

The liberalization trends shown in figure 15-6 come from the Prius-driving, chai-sipping, kale-eating populations of post-industrial Western countries. What about the rest of humanity? Welzel grouped the ninety-five countries in the World Values Survey into ten zones with similar histories and cultures. He also took advantage of the absence of a life-cycle effect to extrapolate emancipative values backwards: the values of a sixty-year-old in 2000, adjusted for the effects of forty years of liberalization in his or her country as a whole, provide a good estimate of the values of a twenty-year-old in 1960. Figure 15-7 shows the trends in liberal values for the different parts of the world over a span of almost fifty years, combining the effects of the changing zeitgeist in each country (like the jump between curves in figure 15-6) with the changing cohorts (the rise along each curve).

Figure 15-7: Liberal values across time (extrapolated), world’s culture zones, 1960–2006

Source: World Values Survey, as analyzed in Welzel 2013, fig. 4.4, updated with data provided by Welzel. Emancipative value estimates for each country in each year are calculated for a hypothetical sample of a fixed age, based on each respondent’s birth cohort, the year of testing, and a country-specific period effect. The labels are geographic mnemonics for Welzel’s “culture zones” and do not literally apply to every country in a zone. I have renamed some of the zones: Protestant Western Europe corresponds to Welzel’s “Reformed West.” US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand = “New West.” Catholic & Southern Europe = “Old West.” Central & Eastern Europe = “Returned West.” East Asia = “Sinic East.” Former Yugoslavia & USSR = “Orthodox East.” South & Southeast Asia = “Indic East.” Countries in each zone are weighted equally.