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

The graph, unsurprisingly, reveals that differences across the world’s culture zones are substantial. The Protestant countries of Western Europe, such as the Netherlands, Scandinavia, and the United Kingdom, are the world’s most liberal, followed by the United States and other wealthy English-speaking countries, then Catholic and Southern Europe, then the former Communist countries of central Europe. Latin America, the industrialized countries of East Asia, and the former republics of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia are more socially conservative, followed by South and Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. The world’s most illiberal region is the Islamic Middle East.

What is surprising, though, is that in every part of the world, people have become more liberal. A lot more liberal: young Muslims in the Middle East, the world’s most conservative culture, have values today that are comparable to those of young people in Western Europe, the world’s most liberal culture, in the early 1960s. Though in every culture both the zeitgeist and the generations became more liberal, in some, like the Islamic Middle East, the liberalization was driven mainly by the generational turnover, and it played an obvious role in the Arab Spring.⁴¹

Can we identify the causes that differentiate the world’s regions and liberalize them all over time? Many society-wide traits correlate with emancipative values, and—in a problem we encounter repeatedly—they tend to correlate with each other, a nuisance for social scientists who want to distinguish causation from correlation.⁴² Prosperity (measured as GDP per capita) correlates with emancipative values, presumably because as people become healthier and more secure they can experiment with liberalizing their societies. The data show that more liberal countries are also, on average, better educated, more urban, less fecund, less inbred (with fewer marriages among cousins), more peaceful, more democratic, less corrupt, and less crime- and coup-ridden.⁴³ Their economies, now and in the past, tend to be built on networks of commerce rather than large plantations or the extraction of oil and minerals.

Yet the single best predictor of emancipative values is the World Bank’s Knowledge Index, which combines per capita measures of education (adult literacy and enrollment in high schools and colleges), information access (telephones, computers, and Internet users), scientific and technological productivity (researchers, patents, and journal articles), and institutional integrity (rule of law, regulatory quality, and open economies).⁴⁴ Welzel found that the Knowledge Index accounts for seventy percent of the variation in emancipative values across countries, making it a far better predictor than GDP.⁴⁵ The statistical result vindicates a key insight of the Enlightenment: knowledge and sound institutions lead to moral progress.

Any tour of progress in rights must look at the most vulnerable sector of humanity, children, who cannot agitate for their own interests but depend upon the compassion of others. We’ve already seen that children the world over have become better off: they are less likely to enter the world motherless, die before their fifth birthday, or grow up stunted for lack of food. Here we’ll see that in addition to escaping these natural assaults, children are increasingly escaping human-made ones: they are safer than they were before, and likelier to enjoy a true childhood.

The well-being of children is yet another case in which lurid headlines terrify news readers even as they have less to be terrified about. Media reports of school shootings, abductions, bullying, cyberbullying, sexting, date rape, and sexual and physical abuse make it seem as if children are living in increasingly perilous times. The data say otherwise. Teenagers’ retreat from dangerous drugs, mentioned in chapter 12, is just one example. In a 2014 review of the literature on violence against children in the United States, the sociologist David Finkelhor and his colleagues reported, “Of 50 trends in exposure examined, there were 27 significant declines and no significant increases between 2003 and 2011. Declines were particularly large for assault victimization, bullying, and sexual victimization.”⁴⁶ Three of those trends are shown in figure 15-8.

Figure 15-8: Victimization of children, US, 1993–2012