I just finished Open: How Collaboration and Curiosity Shaped Humankind by Johan Norberg. He says that openness, to ideas and inventions, is what helps humans flourish. But we fluctuate between allowing openness and shutting it down, just to be safe.
I agree. He says that usually a new dynasty or regime allows invention and openness. But at some point it shuts it all down. The Chinese Song dynasty was an open, flourishing regime. Scholar Mark Elvin says that China would have had a textile revolution during the Song dynasty. Only then the Mongols showed up and then the Ming and in 1433 they closed the place down.
Kinda like the USA. White Trash from Europe started appearing on these shores in 1584, and eventually we Yanks sent the Brits packing. And we became the greatest commercial empire the world has ever seen. But now lefty wokies want to shut the place down, because racism, dead-naming, and climate change.
But for Johan Norberg the problem is Trump. Wherever he goes in the world he meets “liberals and cosmopolitans who want their societies to be free and their countries open”. But then
Populist leaders, like Donald Trump, do their best to upend alliances with other open societies, which makes them — and the US — more divided and weaker.
You mean terminate NATO that was designed to meet the Commie threat and is now still going about 35 years past the sell-by date of the Soviet Union?
Norberg doesn’t like the technocratic, zero-growth, solution to climate change.
Instead we need a system that makes everybody take their contribution to global warming seriously and incentivizes everybody to volunteer their best ideas about how to deal with it.
Hey, Johan! How about we start at the beginning and make the science “open” instead of dominated by governments and the UN’s IPCC and gubmint-funded research and nice people that accuse climate skeptics as “science deniers.” And if we find there is a problem we adapt to it by letting the finest minds get on with it?
There is not a word that I can find in Open about how the populist nationalists, the horrid Trumps and Órbans, are an understandable reaction to the authoritarian rule of the global educated class. These are ordinary people that are actually suffering economically and culturally under the cultural and political domination of their betters.
OK fine. For Norberg,
We are not just traders, we are tribalists…
This is the battle between ‘open and closed’, so much discussed in the context of populism, nationalism, Trump, and Brexit. It is not being fought between two different groups, between globalists and nationalists, or anywheres and somewheres. Rather, it is being fought within all of us, all of the time.
Well, sure. But let us at least admit that a big part of the “political formula” of our ruling class — that is to say, the way it stays in power — is to encourage the tribalism of “oppressed peoples” and to gift its friends and followers in the educated class. And a big part of populism is the instinctive reaction to the injustice of living under the rule of the educated class and its cunning use of tribalism to divide and conquer, and its spending of trillions of dollars in grants and subsidies to its loyal followers in the educated class.
So, for Open, the enemy is the tribalists, forgetting that the most unified and powerful tribe in the world is the global educated class, that unifies itself through its war on the Trumps and the populists\, and its suppression of free speech with its censorship regime of “disinformation,” “misinformation,” and “malinformation.” Not to mention labeling all speech with which it disagrees as “hate” and “bigotry.”
Now I am all for an “open” society in which the ideas and the startup antelopes roam. But humans are humans. When things are going badly for us we tend to blame something or someone. In 1830 there were the Captain Swing riots of British agricultural laborers against threshing machines that were putting them out of a job. In the 1870s there were strikes by workers basically against the reduction of wages due to the post-Civil War deflation. There were strikes in the 1930s in the Great Depression.
Today there is unrest among the peasants in the United States now that prices have increased about 35 percent since the Federal Reserve increased the M2 Money Supply in 2020-21 by about 40 percent. Golly! Who woulda thunk it?
I tell you what I think. I think that a ruling class worthy of the name would know how to deal with these upheavals. They would have developed a culture and a politics that understood the inevitability of economic fluctuations and the problem of old industries being replaced by new industries and techniques, and that people suffering tend to get angry.
In fact the rulers, whether globalists or nationalists or conservatives or progressives or communists or fascists, haven’t a clue what to do when the music changes and people start to feel helpless and left behind by the new technology. In fact, I’d say that rulers and politicians react to change by exploiting it and exploiting the people harmed by the change and also the people inventing the new economy that is both creating new wealth and also ending the good times of people working in the old way.
In a true “open” society the best and brightest and politicians and intellectuals and media mavens and the rest of the educated class would know how to help the people being hurt by the new ways.
My experience is that in a crisis, almost always, the educated class mobilizes the unfortunates against an “enemy” and makes things worse. As in TR’s “malefactors of great wealth,” FDR’s “economic royalists.” And our wokey friends’ “white oppressors.”
And until our leaders, political and intellectual and economic, can figure out how to soften the blows of progress on the folks left behind, then the glorious progress towards an “open” society will be hobbled by people on the losing end of progress who, understandably, think that the whole thing is a scam.