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

To be fair to the left, the libertarian right has embraced the same false dichotomy and seems all too willing to play the left’s straw man.⁴⁰ Right-wing libertarians (in their 21st-century Republican Party version) have converted the observation that too much regulation can be harmful (by over-empowering bureaucrats, costing more to society than it delivers in benefits, or protecting incumbents against competition rather than consumers against harm) into the dogma that less regulation is always better than more regulation. They have converted the observation that too much social spending can be harmful (by creating perverse incentives against work and undermining the norms and institutions of civil society) into the dogma that any amount of social spending is too much. And they have translated the observation that tax rates can be too high into a hysterical rhetoric of “liberty” in which raising the marginal tax rate for income above $400,000 from 35 to 39.6 percent means turning the country over to jackbooted storm troopers. Often the refusal to seek the optimum level of government is justified by an appeal to Friedrich Hayek’s argument in The Road to Serfdom that regulation and welfare lay out a slippery slope along which a country will slide into penury and tyranny.

The facts of human progress strike me as having been as unkind to right-wing libertarianism as to right-wing conservatism and left-wing Marxism. The totalitarian governments of the 20th century did not emerge from democratic welfare states sliding down a slippery slope, but were imposed by fanatical ideologues and gangs of thugs.⁴¹ And countries that combine free markets with more taxation, social spending, and regulation than the United States (such as Canada, New Zealand, and Western Europe) turn out to be not grim dystopias but rather pleasant places to live, and they trounce the United States in every measure of human flourishing, including crime, life expectancy, infant mortality, education, and happiness.⁴² As we saw, no developed country runs on right-wing libertarian principles, nor has any realistic vision of such a country ever been laid out.

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.

Though examining data from history and social science is a better way of evaluating our ideas than arguing from the imagination, the acid test of empirical rationality is prediction. Science proceeds by testing the predictions of hypotheses, and we all recognize the logic in everyday life when we praise or ridicule barroom sages depending on whether events bear them out, when we use idioms that hold people responsible for their accuracy like to eat crow and to have egg on your face, and when we use sayings like “Put your money where your mouth is” and “The proof of the pudding is in the eating.”