Across the Western world, we live in an age of almost unlimited prosperity, freedom and opportunity. While much of the rest of the world continues to suffer from the scourges that have plagued humanity since the dawn of time, the average Western citizen is remarkably free from the risk of starvation, preventable disease and crushing poverty. And although the threat of war has come closer, we have enjoyed close to eight decades of almost entirely uninterrupted peace. Yet most of us are profoundly unaware how unusual and precious our freedoms and comforts are. They are an inheritance which all too often we take for granted, which instead we should cherish and protect.
What is more, even those of us who grasp the astonishing scale of these achievements frequently struggle to articulate how we reached them. Indeed, many of us are now confused about the concept of the ‘West’ itself. In recent years, some have begun to ask questions about why countries all over the globe, from Australia to the United States, are all described with the same geographical designation. This – often deliberate – confusion is a sign that we have forgotten who we are.
The critics are right: the West is not a geographical location. It is a set of cultural and philosophical ideas we have inherited from the ancient Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman civilisations. These ideas are not the same as they were 2,000 years ago. On the contrary, they have been refined, filtered and improved through the centuries to bring us the technological progress, individual liberty and prosperity we now enjoy.
Curiously, many Westerners now deny the very existence of our disproportionate success. To describe our extraordinary achievements risks being accused of being some sort of ‘supremacist’ who is merely describing his own sense of unearned superiority, and not the reality on the ground. But the evidence is very clear – the world is and has been voting with its feet for some time. One need only visit any Western country to see the extraordinary pull our societies have for those who, like me, were not fortunate enough to have been born here. Millions of people risk their lives every year to enter Western countries by any means they can, and no one does the opposite. One does not see large movements of people emigrating to Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Xi Jinping’s China, Kim Jong-Un’s North Korea or the theocracy in Iran. This extraordinary fact, which we all take for granted, requires some sort of explanation.
Why is this happening?
To describe an entire culture in a short essay is, of course, impossible. Whole libraries have been written about the evolution of our thinking that explore what makes us different. We ought to begin, however, by deciding to not be afraid of the word ‘different’. If we acknowledge the reality that our civilisation generates different outputs to others, we must then necessarily acknowledge that the inputs must be different too. When asked what makes us different, we often reach for words like ‘democracy’, ‘freedom’, and ‘capitalism’, but many of us have forgotten why they are valuable and what they actually mean.
Let us therefore focus on three critical pillars of the modern West which sit underneath the slogans.
The first of these is the central premise of our civilisation – the idea of the sanctity of the individual. This notion, which would have been considered radical throughout most of human history, and remains so outside our civilisation, posits that every individual has an inherent moral value which cannot be forcefully denied for the needs of the collective. This comes from the Judeo-Christian concept of the Imago Dei, human beings made ‘in the image of God’ and thereby having innate human dignity. From this central tenet of our worldview flows the form of government we now call ‘democracy’, which evolved from the idea of representative government. That one should have a say in how one is governed is another radical, Western idea which is a natural consequence of the belief that every individual matters. In many other cultures, the people who rule over you are not viewed as a choice, but rather like an act of God or natural ascendancy of power. Sometimes, the ruler is bad and that must be endured. At other times, he is good and for that we must be thankful.
Like any system, government by consent has both strengths and weaknesses. Its big strength is responsiveness to feedback and the ability either to hold failing leaders to account, or to remove them. This impetus seeps into all the hierarchies of our society, which become flatter and less rigid as a result. The armies of Western countries, for example, fight better because feedback from the soldier on the ground is more likely to reach the generals through more transparent and accountable channels of communication.
The second pillar of our civilisation is derived significantly from the first, but, nonetheless, has a prominence and a function of its own. We believe that, wherever possible, the freedom of human beings to speak their mind, pursue their interests and engage in business, research, and creativity of every kind ought not to be constrained without a significant and pressing reason. Put simply, we think that – all other things being equal – the more freedoms we enjoy, the better.
But of course, this does not mean the freedom to do whatever you want without any constraint whatsoever. Clearly, even in a democracy, freedom is constrained by the rule of law. And yet the law is there to protect freedom for everyone, and ensure that when one person exercises their freedoms, they do not infringe on or undermine another person’s freedoms. Freedom is not the right to do what we want, but what we ought. It is the freedom to live up to the very best of our potential, to create, innovate, debate, explore, question, believe and flourish.
This is not true of other, more collectivist, cultures where the individual’s first job is to subjugate his own preferences to the needs of the group. While the collectivist system has some advantages, it is necessarily a brake on innovation and growth. Innovation is a process of changing the status quo and that requires doing things differently. Societies which encourage their citizens to suppress their own differences stymie their technological, scientific, cultural and economic development.
A key product of the value we place on freedom of all kinds is freedom of expression, which is fundamental to everything that our societies are and do. Representative government is impossible without the free expression of political opinions and robust debate. Pioneering research is impossible in an environment in which people dare not express controversial ideas, because pioneering ideas are by their very nature frequently controversial. But, even more fundamental, is the fact that human beings cannot think without speaking. The scientific reasons for this are outside of my area of expertise, but we all know the experience of talking or writing in order to understand our own thoughts. Not only that, we also all know the experience of listening to someone who is freely expressing their ideas and modifying our thinking as a result. In other words, to think well, one has to be able to speak freely and hear – and consider – the free speech of others too.
Finally, the unbelievable increase in the living standards we have witnessed, not just of Western citizens but of the entire world, has only occurred in the last two centuries. Before that, everyone but a handful of monarchs and their aristocrats lived in miserable, crushing poverty. The reason humanity no longer suffers under these conditions has its roots in the Industrial Revolution, which converted the gains of science into technological achievements that have transformed the world and continue to do so. That this revolution occurred in England was no accident. As discussed above, it was facilitated by a number of factors, including the intellectual freedoms of the Enlightenment which fostered a culture of scientific inquiry and innovation, and also a strong legal system whose basis was the evolving notion of the need to protect the rights of individuals. But, crucially, prominent among these rights was the right to private property under the law, which protected investments and encouraged innovation. Western culture, more than any other, has the intellectual and legal framework which is a facilitator of capitalism: we believe that if you create something of value to your fellow citizens, you should enjoy the rewards of your contribution and be protected from their arbitrary seizure or expropriation. Contrast this protection, for example, with the communist worldview in which people who accumulate wealth are necessarily eyed with suspicion and hostility. During the Soviet period, everyone from the aristocracy all the way down to the rich peasants was stripped of their property for precisely this reason.
To this day, many countries do not have true private property rights. Mikhail Khodorkovsky, for example, was believed to have been the richest man in Russia. Until he crossed Vladimir Putin. At which point he was imprisoned, and almost all of his property was removed from his possession under various pretences. The same is true of Chinese billionaires who remain prosperous only as long as they remain loyal servants of the Chinese Communist Party.
The horrors inflicted on both the Chinese and Soviet people by these regimes are truly unspeakable. From the millions who starved, as a result of government mismanagement, to millions more who found themselves sent to hard labour camps, or simply executed for the crime of speaking their mind or having the temerity to disagree with their government, the extent of the cruelty collectivist ideologues necessarily inflict on their citizens is beyond measure. One only has to read Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s ‘The Gulag Archipelago’, or accounts of the Cultural Revolution in China, or any of the memoirs published more recently by survivors of North Korea’s prison camps, to know this.
Capitalism creates unprecedented prosperity because instead of applying a collectivist, top-down model, it has instead harnessed the greater driver of human behaviour: incentives. When properly aligned, the capitalist system encourages us to act in service of our fellow man precisely because doing so is beneficial to us. Rather than attempting to beat out of us our ‘selfish’ desires to usher in utopia, the West-invented capitalist model deals with reality.
In societies with rigid hierarchies, where frequently a single man and his entrenched service bureaucracy are in charge, this is not the case. It is not to your benefit to serve your fellow man – what benefits you the most is serving the hierarchy, often to the detriment of your fellow man.
These three principal values – the sanctity of the individual, freedom of expression (and other basic freedoms such as freedom of conscience, association and assembly), and innovation (including private property rights and entrepreneurialism) – are the reason for our success. And the proof of their power is in the fact that other countries which were not traditionally part of our civilisation, but which adopted them – such as Japan, South Korea and Taiwan – now enjoy many of the same benefits: millions lifted out of poverty, children who would once have died in infancy living to adulthood and freedoms their ancestors could never have imagined.
The question is increasingly being asked as to how best to preserve and protect these achievements. There are many things that we can campaign for and demand from our elected representatives. However, the most powerful thing each of us can do is to pass on the understanding of the uniqueness of our great inheritance to our children. In a society that is as comfortable as ours that is no small task – but is possible. One of the most effective tools for doing so is travel. As we say in Russian, everything is understood in comparison. The more we see the world beyond the confines of our own civilisation, the more our privilege stands out.
There is always room for improvement, of course, and as the technological, geopolitical, social and cultural landscape changes, we must continue to adapt these values to the reality of the present day. As long as we retain the right to choose who governs us, are able to speak freely and can profit from improving the lives of our fellow citizens, we are sure to do so.
This essay is an extract from ‘The Best of Our Inheritance: Restoring Our Foundations’, a new book published by the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC). ‘The Best of Our Inheritance’ is a collection of 15 essays by some of the world’s leading thinkers, on the foundations of Western Civilisation. It is available for pre-order here: https://www.arcforum.com/store/p/the-best-of-our-inheritance-arc-research
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