Last month at Yale, the influential political blogger Curtis Yarvin, in a debate against Free Press contributor Jed Rubenfeld, argued that America ought to “end the democratic experiment”—and establish a monarchy. Yarvin has noted that Donald Trump is “biologically suited” to be America’s monarch. The ideas may sound extreme, but they have been influential. J.D. Vance describes Yarvin as “a friend,” and has cited his work. And Yarvin is part of a family of movements, known as the Dark Enlightenment, Techno-authoritarianism, and Neo-Reaction (NRx)—that reject the entire family of enlightenment values.
Meanwhile, theocracy is making a comeback, in movements known as theoconservatism, Christian Nationalism, and National Conservatism. The “National Conservatism Statement of Principles,” for example, declares that “where a Christian majority exists, public life should be rooted in Christianity and its moral vision, which should be honored by the state and other institutions both public and private.” The list of signatories is a lookbook of influential conservatives, including Charlie Kirk, Peter Thiel, and Trump administration insiders Michael Anton and Russell Vought—as well as our fellow Free Press contributors Christopher Rufo and Rod Dreher.
The latter, a friend of the vice president, has said elsewhere that the West will not “recover until and unless we become re-enchanted and seek a form of Christianity, and indeed of Judaism, that is more mystical, that valorizes this direct perception of the Holy Spirit, of holiness, and of transcendence.”
These ideas are not idle philosophical ruminations. As they infiltrate the brain trust of the MAGA movement, they may serve to justify Donald Trump’s vandalism of Enlightenment innovations such as science, free trade, international institutions, and checks on executive power that have allowed this nation to flourish since the day it was born.
Of course, humanity has already tried monarchy and theocracy—during the Middle Ages—and sure enough, some of the new reactionaries are saying that those times were not so bad after all. Dreher writes admiringly: “In the mind of medieval Christendom, the spirit world and the material world penetrated each other. . . . Men construed reality in a way that empowered them to harmonize everything conceptually and find meaning amid the chaos.”
Other influential conservatives go further in justifying medieval hierarchies. On his eponymous show, Tucker Carlson recently declared: “Feudalism is so much better than what we have now. Because at least in feudalism, the leader is vested in the prosperity of the people he rules.”
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In this essay we will show how the reaction against modernity has it backward. Before the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and the resulting “Great Enrichment,” life in the West was characterized for most people not by meaning and morality but by ignorance, cruelty, and squalor. Today we are blessed not just with prosperity and its underappreciated gifts, but with a robust moral mission—one that is grounded in our best understanding of reality, and the indisputable goal of reducing suffering and improving flourishing. Meaning comes from reason and well-being, not scripture and salvation; from governance with the consent of the governed, not rule by kings and clergymen.
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The Enlightenment project of grounding morality in reason and well-being left us with a coherent fabric of arguments against the brutality and injustice that had been ubiquitous in human history. These arguments became the foundation of civilized society.
A partial list: Kant’s categorical imperative and his practical prescriptions for peace. The American Founders’ analyses of tyranny, democracy, and fundamental rights. Bentham’s cases against cruelty to animals and the persecution of homosexuals. Astell’s brief against the oppression of women. Voltaire’s arguments against religious persecution. Montesquieu’s case against slavery. Beccaria’s arguments against judicial torture. Rousseau’s case against harsh treatment of children.
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Westerners have been complaining about how wealth causes moral decline for millennia. Few of the complainants have reflected on how it was wealth that gave them the luxury to complain about that wealth. Their contemporaries who died in childbirth, or whose lives were wracked with hunger, pain, and disease, were not as lucky. The vanquishing of early death, propelled not by prayer but knowledge, may be humanity’s greatest moral triumph.
Some numbers can shake us out of this spoiled complacency. (For sources, see our respective books Ten Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know and Enlightenment Now.) In 1800, the European life expectancy was 33 years; today, it is 79 years—which means that we have been granted not just extra life, but an extra life. Much of that gift came from leaps in prosperity that spared the lives of children. Before the turn of the 20th century, a third to a half of European children perished before their 5th birthday. Today that fate befalls three-tenths of one percent. Even the poorest countries today lose a fraction of the children that Europe did until recently. If being spared the agony of losing a child is not “meaningful,” what is?
Children who survived often faced orphanhood, hunger, parasites, workhouses, and beatings. Famines, which could kill a quarter of the population, recurred around once a decade. Today, starvation in much of the world has given way to obesity. It is easy to condemn gluttony, but searching for life’s meaning is surely easier on a full stomach.
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Humanity will always know suffering. Our bodies are fragile and mortal. Our ignorance will always outstrip our knowledge. Our moral flaws preclude perfect harmony. Our precious freedom includes the freedom of people to mess up their lives.
Yet the 21st century, with all its woes, is a better time to live than any time before. Extreme poverty, child and maternal mortality, illiteracy, tyranny, violent crime, and war deaths are lower than in any previous century. The wealth that theoconservatives find so corrosive funds the education and leisure that allow individuals to contemplate meaning, whether it be in work, family, community, nature, science, sport, art, or yes, religion. Another gift of modernity is that people are not burned alive for their beliefs but allowed to hold whichever ones they find meaningful.
It’s sometimes claimed that for all these opportunities, people today are suffering from a new “crisis of meaning.” Here again we shouldn’t confuse nostalgia with fact. Illiterate medieval peasants left us with no records of how meaningful they thought their lives were. As the historian Eleanor Janega points out, they themselves thought they were living in a time of decline, and “they were rebelling constantly.”
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Every generation believes that it stands amid ruins of a better era. Nostalgics have fallen for this illusion, weaving a fantasy of civilizational decline from Edenic bliss. All available evidence shows the opposite. The early stages of our civilization were stained by ignorance, superstition, sickening cruelty, grinding poverty, and early death. From those rude beginnings, the heirs of the Enlightenment deployed knowledge and sympathy to claw increments of progress from an indifferent universe. Wise people should cherish these accomplishments, and ensure that we don’t squander them based on figments about a make-believe golden age.
Charles Cooke decries the move in Great Britain to greatly shrink the right to trial by jury. A slice:
Sometimes, Americans are shocked to hear me include jury trials when I list fundamental rights that are being abridged in other countries. But they shouldn’t be. Certainly, the BBC’s reference to “the ancient right to a jury trial” is correct as a descriptive matter. But as a legal proposition, it is no more an enforceable “right” in contemporary Britain than is this year’s top tax rate. Unlike in the United States, where the protection sits above the transient political process, the provision of juries in Britain is little more than the quotidian choice of the incumbent government. If, as seems now to be happening, the British government decides that juries are inefficient or undesirable in a particular situation — or, even, per se — it can abolish them at will.
And it’s not just juries. Once upon a time in Britain there was also an “ancient right” to free speech, an “ancient right” to bear arms, and an “ancient right” not to be detained indefinitely without trial. Now, those are all memories. Something bad happened — a “hate crime,” a mass shooting, a terrorist attack — and they were jettisoned at the first opportunity. To avoid this happening in the United States, we wrote down our Constitution. It worked.
Jeffrey Miron reports on “a downside of national security concerns.” Here’s his conclusion:
Regardless, this episode [of WWII U.S. government internment of Japanese-Americans] should remind policymakers that even for national security, policy choices should reflect benefits relative to costs, not just (alleged) benefits.
Bryan Riley tweets: (HT Scott Lincicome)
🤫I’ll let you in on a secret: Average foreign tariffs have been falling for decades. (link in reply)
Possible factors:
✅Trade agreements
✅Countries slashing tariffs to attract investment
✅Developing countries transitioning to more efficient methods of taxation
☹️The United States has been an exception to the tariff-cutting trend for most of the 21st century.
Jim Bovard reviews David Beito’s new book, FDR: A New Political Life. A slice:
FDR and his brain trust believed in the boundless concentration of power. The New York Times reported on March 12, 1933, that Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace and a group of farm lobbyists urged Roosevelt to ask for “farm dictator powers” to solve the agriculture crisis. The Roosevelt administration intentionally set U.S. crop prices far above world market prices, destroying farm exports and then claiming that the government needed boundless power over farmers to protect them against surpluses. Within a few years, the Agriculture Department (USDA) was dictating exactly how many acres of grain each wheat farmer could grow. An Indiana farmer exceeded his quota to grow wheat to feed to his hogs. The Roosevelt administration hounded him all the way to the Supreme Court, claiming it needed a free hand to “suppress…a public evil.”
Arnold Kling notes several parallels of the Trump era with the Nixon era.
Jennifer Huddleston reveals “what sports can teach us about competition policy.” A slice:
Competition doesn’t only exist on the field. It also exists in the market. So why then do we seem not to greet technology disruptors’ success with the same sense of pride and excitement as an upset in sports? Instead, it seems policymakers and pundits meet success with skepticism, similar to a team or fans that immediately rush to blame the refs or call the other team cheaters rather than admitting they got outplayed.
The reality is that technological disruptors and sports upsets have a lot in common. Before their disruption, the records, dynasties, and top teams often seem as if they will never be beaten. Headlines often talk about looking for the next great in a team or a player that resembles a current great. Sometimes that works, but often the next great is the player or team that sees the game differently or finds a unique way to win or excel that was previously ignored.
The same is true with the tech sector. Headlines will question who is the next Facebook, Google, or previously the next AOL. But often times, the next big thing is the company that provides a completely different and disruptive product that we couldn’t have predicted.
The reality is that, just as in sports, the signs of the next great player are often there but only visible to a few. If we only look for the players who play like Michael Jordan or Tom Brady, we might miss some of the most exciting and innovative changes to the game.
