Here's my (spoiler alert!) synopsis: Civilization requires openness.
Johan Norberg's root point (as I see it) is that the immense complexity of human nature is firmly anchored in the millennia since our proto-sapiens ancestors came down from the trees. Our evolved traits beget a social order quite different from our simian cousins. We collaborate, innovate, and form trading networks with outsiders. We are born to solve problems, energized by challenges. And we can selectively subdue our primal "us versus them" impulses to form broad cooperative communities. There the raw zero-sum world of nature can be superseded by positive-sum societies in which human progress is liberated from inherited constraints.
It took untold ages for this to happen, even longer to become obvious. We needed first to speak, make tools, alphabets, moveable type, information archives, and to create knowledge networks to match our trade networks. About 200 years ago this cumulative progress began to accelerate dramatically. By fits, starts, and irregular leaps forward and backward, we created the modern world by trial and error, and most of all by increasingly open collaboration. We began solving the enormously complex problems we inherited from nature (predators, starvation, resource exhaustion, disease, droughts & floods) and began to mitigate the residual defects of our own nature (wars, violence, crime, & power lust).
In that geological moment millions of innovations pulled humanity out of the pit of grinding poverty & humiliating servitude. Wealth expanded exponentially--roughly 3,000% and counting--to levels unimaginable to our ancestors. Global poverty in the last 50 years has plummeted. Despite the impressions from our daily news, wars, crime, violence and infant mortality have dwindled, lifespans tripled, useful inventions now come in avalanches that make progress conspicuous. Liberal democracy and human rights have expanded dramatically. Malthusian limits to human flourishing were pushed over the event horizon as the world's population approaches 8 billion with third world poverty dropping dramatically.
Simultaneous advances in science, technology and medicine are in the last hundred years--or even the last decade--boggle the mind if you try to mentally list them. But even faster acceleration is coming. That wonderful collaboration catalyst, the internet, now fully global, is a fire hose of solutions extinguishing problems. Almost all these advances were spontaneous and unplanned. Innovation is too serendipitous to be constrained. And it works its magic with open, voluntary cooperation. Trying to control it enervates. Close the blinds, and that creativity is channeled into dark purposes.
Even at high speed, progress still moves unevenly. And perennially threatened with backward leaps. The monkey parts of our nature are still with us. Demagogues & dictators are rousing nationalist mobs to carry us back to an idyllic past (or utopian future) free of all the unresolved tensions that come with modernity.
Intellectuals complain we must stop this chaotic race into the future and submit to a redemptive master plan. In academic echo-chambers students are taught that reason, objectivity, tolerance, and open inquiry are only tools of oppression. Or that progress can only come through enforced political correctness, income equality, and an open-ended quest for social justice based on group identity.
Will we push on to an open, prosperous and optimistic future--or retreat into a mythic golden era last seen in 1984? If openness is lost, progress won't just halt in place. Openness is just as necessary for the flow of wealth as to invent it. If we drift back to authoritarian rule all 8 billion of us will likely experience the return of the Malthusian limits we had just vanquished.
Norberg's hypotheses and conclusions aren't unique. Steve Pinker and Matt Ridley (and others) have said quite similar things, but he's not simply rephrasing others' arguments. Bottom line: Agree with it or not, it's a damn good--and very thought provoking--book!
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