3 août 2018 - 2018: The Economist: Western civilisation is worth defending

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We need liberal values of freedom and markets more than ever, says Joe Lonsdale, an entrepreneur and investor

Aug 3rd 2018


By Joe Lonsdale

"...Like all civilisations, the West’s evolution included terrible violence, such as the subjugation of the native populations in North America and the slave trade. Its history was often ugly and racist, from the idea of “the white man’s burden” that was used to justify colonialism to the pseudoscience of eugenics. These noxious episodes lead critics to claim that Western principles are vacuous: a mask for unrepentant imperialism or merely the philosophy of a simpler age.

But that is plain wrong. In fact, the core ideas of the West hold many of the answers that we seek today in response to a populism which rages on the left and on the right. Instead of being the source of society’s ills, the values of Western civilisation are part of the cure. They are needed now more than ever...."

"...For most of history, the average worker earned $1-3 a day – even at the peak of Roman prosperity. Only a select few had rights to accumulate and hold property, and all faced the threat of violent expropriation. Fear and bondage reigned until the 17th and 18th century enlightenment thinkers aligned around natural rights to one’s person and property. In a passage that captures the soul of the modern West, John Locke wrote:

The State of Nature has a Law of Nature to govern it, which obliges everyone: And Reason, which is that Law, teaches all Mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his Life, Health, Liberty, or Possessions. (“Second Treatise on Government”, 1689.)

Locke’s moral insight is “liberalism”, a principle of mutual restraint inspired by the inviolable rights of others to design their own lives. Freedom is life in accordance with reason; reason compels us to respect the freedoms of others. By respecting the rights of others, we guarantee our own.

This Enlightenment thinking was put into practice in the Glorious Revolution in 1688 in Britain, and especially in the founding of America, where Locke’s liberalism formed the backbone of the new republic. To be sure, in practice there were deep contradictions—the founders were simultaneously freedom fighters and slave-owners—but the institutional architecture was in place. The West’s new framework of property rights and political freedoms unleashed a surge of creative energy, enabling a three-century miracle of growth, prosperity and unimaginable wonders of innovation.

It didn’t have to happen that way. The natural order of things is for life to be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short” (in the words of Thomas Hobbes, a contemporary of Locke). Western civilisation is a great artifice: a liberal framework that enshrines property rights, allowing us to restrain most forms of tribalism, participate in free markets and prosper by serving others regardless of their identities.

These political rights of treating people equally and letting them get on with their business had a hugely beneficial effect on society and the economy. Consider that historically speaking, it is actually unnatural for the best ideas to dominate and spread, thus allowing entrepreneurs to displace incumbent, vested interests. More common is for force or hierarchy, not the meritocracy of ideas, to win. However, the West established a cultural and legal environment where a competition of clever ideas and activities could flourish.

The Western edifice of science and knowledge bolstered and fed off the upward spiral of prosperity, enabling our civilisation to fund healthcare, education, infrastructure and other trappings of modernity. Yet today Western civilisation faces a crisis of confidence, a hollowing out of the liberal order. Our society’s failure to adhere to liberal tenets of open markets and a contest of ideas imposes painful costs on the economy and on working-class Americans. ..."

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