Marian Tupy: Hello and welcome to a new episode of Human Progress Podcast. Today I’m very lucky to speak to Matt Johnson who recently had a very interesting essay in the Quillette, which is an Australian publication, titled The Open Society and Its New Enemies, what Karl Popper’s classic can teach us about the threats facing democracies today. So Matt, welcome. Thanks for joining us.
Matt Johnson: Yeah, thanks so much for having me. Appreciate it.
Marian Tupy: So Matt, first, perhaps just very briefly, you could tell us who Karl Popper was and what this big book is about, why it’s so famous, just very briefly.
Matt Johnson: Yeah, sure. He’s mainly known for his scientific work, especially his ideas around the concept of falsifiability, which I think has a sort of nice connection to what we’ll be talking about today. But he published a book called The Open Society and Its Enemies in 1945. So he wrote it in the shadow of World War II. And he started writing it right after the Nazi annexation of Austria. And it’s just a very powerful and I think clarifying set of principles that anybody who’s interested in liberal democracy and furthering the broader project of building open societies around the world today. And he talks a lot about the threats to open societies in his time. And I think those threats are actually still quite relevant today. So that’s, yeah, it’s a basic rundown.
Marian Tupy: Basically, so in terms of his scientific work, this would be he’s got a great popularizer in David Deutsch, who talks very much about conjecture and refutation as the right way to increase human knowledge. Is that how you understand it?
Matt Johnson: Absolutely.
Marian Tupy: Yeah. And then, I guess, the listener may want to ask, why talk about liberal democracies and why talk about openness? And I guess here I would basically say that it is our conjecture here at Human Progress that openness is actually very important when it comes to human progress. Have you ever thought about, before we get into Popper and so forth, did you ever think about or written about the connection between openness, perhaps going as far as liberal democracy, and the scope and speed of human progress?
Matt Johnson: Oh, yeah, certainly. I mean, it’s been a major theme of my work for a long time. I was heavily influenced by Steven Pinker and his book Enlightenment Now. I’m also very heavily influenced by Fukuyama. And I think that there is a very strong connection between the development of liberal democracy and open societies throughout the 20th century and human progress. You know, liberal democracy, unlike its authoritarian rivals, has error correction mechanisms built in. It allows for pluralism in society. It can encompass many different ideas and conceptions about the good life and allow people to cooperate without the threat of violence or coercion. And then there’s also the economic element. It facilitates free trade and open exchange within societies because it’s rule-based and it’s law-bound. And those are the sort of conditions you need to develop economically. So it’s just the system that has worked the best for the longest.
Marian Tupy: And I guess you could say that the error-correcting mechanism, it is the ability of people, when they see that something is not working out, to elect a new government to change course. Like, for example, the Americans did with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 or Margaret Thatcher in 1979. And the error-correcting mechanism works not just in politics, but also in economics, because very often democracies will produce results, which, well, occasionally, maybe very often, produce results which do not lead to necessarily higher economic growth rates. And then you need democracy to undo that and change economic course as well as social one, right?
Matt Johnson: Yeah. Well, we have a very powerful realization of that argument in the form of the character of Donald Trump right now. So hopefully by the midterms, there will be a self-correcting mechanism that takes hold, but we’ll see.
Marian Tupy: So, okay. Human progress assumes that there is a little bit of directionality in history, in a sense that we can say that living in 2025 is better than living in 1025 or 25 AD. And you begin your excellent essay by distinguishing or rather raising the dangers of what Karl Popper called historicism. In other words, a belief in the inevitability of certain political or economic outcomes, and then the belief in historical progress. So can you unwind it for us? What is the difference between acknowledging, well, first of all, do you agree that there is some sort of a directionality in terms of human affairs and how different is it from this historicism that Popper was worried about?
Matt Johnson: So, yeah, I do think there’s been a directionality in human history. I think that the best way to approach it is to first sort of articulate Popper’s concerns with historicism and his attack on it, and then get into why it is that it seems like we’re actually moving forward in general. Popper regarded historicism as extremely dangerous because it treats human beings as a means to an end. If you already know what you’re working toward, if you’re working toward a glorious worker state, a utopia, or some sort of religious state or utopia, then it doesn’t really matter how much sacrifice you have to make in the meantime. It doesn’t matter how much pain you have to inflict. You’re not treating your citizens now as ends whose rights must be protected and whose interests must be observed. You’re treating them as raw material. They’re just characters in this grand historical story. So that’s the first concern, is that you’re not really focused on human well-being in the moment. You’re just focused on some ideology or a future state. And the second concern is that it’s a very anti-scientific idea because you can pretty much hammer any existing data into a form that fits historicist prophecy.
Matt Johnson: So, I mean, you’d see this with Stalin who would say anytime there was a setback, it was all part of the same plan. It was all just some globalist saboteurs attacking the Soviet Union, or it was some other reversion that was just part of the grand historical unfolding that was the move toward the dictatorship of the proletariat. So there’s no sense in which new information can change the course of government’s policies if it’s a historicist, governed by historicist ideas. And so those are just a couple of the elements of Popper’s critique. I think it differs from a general idea about historical progress in the sense that we have a lot of data to suggest that we’ve improved. We have a lot of economic data to suggest that people have escaped poverty at an incredible rate since the middle of the 20th century. We’ve seen democratization on a vast scale around the world. We’ve seen interstate relations become much more tranquil and peaceful over the past several decades. I mean, the idea of Germany and France fighting a war now is pretty much inconceivable to most people, but it’s a huge historical victory, and it’s sort of unprecedented in the history of Western Europe.
Matt Johnson: So there are good reasons to believe that we’ve advanced and we’ve progressed. And that would be the core difference between an actual observation and acknowledgment of historical progress and historicism, which is much less grounded in empirical reality, I suppose.
Marian Tupy: I once heard this phrase, it sounds so weird, but immanentizing the eschaton, a lot of people talk about. In other words, you’ve got this goal out there, the teleological goal of, let’s say, a classless society, and you’ve got a bunch of people who decide to immanentize it. In other words, to bring it about, to speed up the process, like the Marxist vanguard. And the speaker, whoever it was, I can’t remember, claimed that basically the greatest humanitarian abuses, the greatest abuses of human rights happen precisely when a small group of people decide that they see, they have read the teleological outcome of history and they want to move the society toward it. You’re basically bringing about the goal, the dream that you have perceived. And in your essay, you say that the difference between that kind of thinking, that historicist thinking and teleological end is very different from thinking about human progress as not predetermined, not designed, but just an outcome of some sort of historical forces that just happen in the background. Could you elaborate basically on that? Because I think that those historical forces in the background are, as you say, the difference between closeness and openness.
Matt Johnson: Yeah, well, I mean, I think one thing that Popper acknowledged was the role of historical contingency and how things developed. I mean, he does claim that he finds it extremely difficult to imagine the world reverting to the closed society across the board, which in the essay, I say that sort of flirts with historicism in a sense. But he referenced things like global trade, just the interchange between cultures and societies that came about through imperialism. There are just a lot of forces that expose people to new ideas and new ways of living. There was nothing necessarily predetermined about any of that stuff. I mean, none of the wars or none of the economic integration that happened was just a necessary outcome in any sense. But because it happened, it’s hard to imagine reverting back to the closed society. And I think you could make that argument today. In fact, the argument’s much stronger now. I mean, the world’s just much more globalized. We have immediate access to information. We’ve seen the record of liberal democracy versus its ideological challengers over the decades. So it’s just that there’s a strong case to be made and a case that can be grounded in data and observable reality for something like liberal democracy or capitalism.
Matt Johnson: Whereas, yeah, historicism, it’s often based on flawed premises. So Marx believed that the gap between the rich and the poor would just become so vast and so excruciating that revolution would eventually be inevitable. He believed that the poor would just get poorer and poorer and poorer until they were essentially just slaves. He didn’t imagine a system in which there are strong social safety nets. Most and pretty much any Western liberal democracy today, social spending accounts for over 20 % of GDP. And a lot of people across every stratum of society have become much wealthier. And this just wasn’t a state of affairs that Marx envisioned. I mean, global GDP has exploded by something like 60 fold, adjusting for inflation since he originally published the Communist Manifesto. So it’s just, yeah, it’s just an extraordinary profusion of well-being that he couldn’t have seen coming.
Marian Tupy: Yeah, I think that while Marx made this argument that because of competition between private enterprises, what would happen is that you have a continuous decrease of profit margins. And so the way you make up profit is by taking ever more from the workers, thereby pauperizing them. But of course, that was a false premise because even during Marx’s own lifetime, GDP per capita, income per capita in Britain rose by some 130 % amongst the working class. But just to put a pin in this argument, so human progress is not historicist, you argue, because it happens in the background. It is not designed. It’s just how people who are free get to improve the world, get to achieve human progress. Whereas historicism involves design, involves force. Am I butchering your argument?
Matt Johnson: No, not at all. Marx actually wrote that the sort of unfolding of history or the birth of a new historical era is inevitable. It’s unavoidable. But he said, if you understand it, then you can just lessen the birth pangs and make it an easier transition. That’s what he saw as the responsibility of leaders and people who would eventually become Marxists. Not to say that the people who spoke in Marx’s name were always aligned with his own philosophy. But he did believe that you just kind of had to soften the blow and make the transition as smooth as possible because he knew what we were transitioning toward. And that’s the central conceit of historicism. Whereas, yeah, if you take a more Popperian view, then you’re much more modest. You have to ground every policy in empirical reality. You have to adjust when things don’t work. You’re not just birthing a new civilization and a new paradigm that you already know everything about. You don’t know what the future holds. What’s worked in the past. You can come up with some ideas. I mean, Popper described this as piecemeal social engineering. Instead of this vast social experiment that we can conduct on society writ large, he said we should do this in a piecemeal and modest way.
Matt Johnson: So yeah, I think a certain element of humility is extremely important, and it’s very absent in historicist fantasies.
Marian Tupy: Right. So human progress, the way I understand it, certainly my approach to talking about it is that it’s backward-looking. We can say that we are richer than we were in the past. Fewer women die in childbirth than in the past. Fewer infants die. We have fewer casualties in wars than we used to, even fewer wars than we used to, et cetera. But we don’t know where we are going. That is the element of surprise.
Matt Johnson: Yeah, absolutely. We really don’t. I mean, there were nuclear scares during the Cold War that could have plunged us into nuclear war. It makes no sense to try to cram every idea or every new policy into some existing paradigm or prophecy. All we can do is incrementally move toward a better world for everybody, and you have to have certain principles to do that. And one would be treating people as ends in themselves and recognizing the value of data and observable reality. Right now, one of the frightening things about the current moment we’re living through is I think there are a lot of mistaken conceptions operating on the mind of somebody like Donald Trump. I mean, he thinks nuclear proliferation is inevitable, for example. This is something he’s argued for a long time. I remember him arguing it during the 2015 primary. And that’s a horrifying thought, and it’s not true. Nuclear proliferation has actually been arrested. I mean, many countries that used to have nuclear weapons have decommissioned them and given them up. It’s more difficult to go from that to a nuclear-free world, that’s for sure.
Matt Johnson: But just throwing your hands up and saying this isn’t something we can do is a huge error, and it’s a dangerous error. I mean, Hitler was convinced that there would be global starvation within a couple of decades, and this is why he had the Hunger Plan, which was part of his plan to build a huge Eurasian empire. I mean, tens of millions of people would have died in the Hunger Plan. It would have been artificial starvation as a matter of policy. And then within a few decades, Hitler, had he not waged World War II, had he lived to see what happened around the world, is that food prices plummeted, and starvation didn’t set in, even though there were billions of more people. But he had this conviction that the world, that scarcity was just an inevitable outcome in the future, and he was wrong about that. And there’s so many examples of that, where people base their prophecies on flawed information.
Marian Tupy: Yeah, I think that’s very often the view of Hitler is skewed by overemphasizing racialism, which was obviously there, but not putting enough emphasis on his Malthusianism.
Marian Tupy: He believed Lebensraum was necessary because Germany simply couldn’t produce enough food. And so rather than engaging genetic engineering, he sent his divisions throughout Eastern Europe. Okay, but we’ve talked now about the future and making incremental changes toward the future, and where we are heading in terms of open societies, which necessarily brings us to another big name in your piece, which is that of Frank Fukuyama. You said that you are a fan of his. So am I. But Frank seems to me heavily misunderstood. So let me see how you read Frank Fukuyama, and then maybe we can, let’s see if we’re reading differently.
Matt Johnson: Yeah, sure. I am a huge fan of Fukuyama. He had a big influence on me early on when I was a freshman in college, I think. He is perhaps the most misread political science or writer, whatever you want to say, of our time. Because there are just countless lazy journalists who want to add a little bit of intellectual heft to some article about some new crisis in the world, or the re-election of Trump, or September 11th, or what have you, some catastrophe. And they’ll say, well, it turns out Fukuyama was wrong. There are still negative headlines out there. There are still bad things happening in the world, still crises to attend to. And that’s just a fundamental misreading of Fukuyama’s argument, because he never said that bad things would stop happening. He never said there would be an end to war, an end to poverty, or political upheaval. His basic argument was that the end of history, end meaning end point, not end of events or end of a timeline, was that liberal capitalist democracy is the most sustainable political and economic system, and it had proven itself against the great ideological competitors in the 20th century, and that it would continue to do so in the future. And he listed a few potential candidates that could challenge it, such as theocracy. And I think it’s still a live thesis.
Matt Johnson: This is the thing that I find so frustrating. There’s really no point at which you can say the thesis has been either disproven or proven. I mean, I suppose if the world collapsed into global totalitarianism or something, and it just remained that way for thousands of years, then yeah. But right now, there’s still a vibrant democratic world that’s competing against a growing and more consolidated authoritarian world. And I think that liberal democracy will continue to outperform. I think we have every reason to believe that. So that would be my basic reading of Fukuyama. But yeah, we can get into the details if you want.
Marian Tupy: So let me put it slightly differently, and let’s see if you disagree. So Fukuyama does not say that democracy and capitalism have won to the extent that everybody has to accept capitalism and free markets, that it is somehow going against his thesis if Afghanistan doesn’t become a liberal democracy. That’s not what he’s saying. What he’s saying is that free market democracies are the best system that humans have come up with, but whether people accept it or not will depend on them. It’s there for the taking. It doesn’t mean that people will necessarily partake in it.
Matt Johnson: Yeah, I think one distinction he makes is he says that liberal democracy has sort of won in the realm of ideas.
Marian Tupy: Realm of ideas.
Marian Tupy: Yeah, and even after he made his initial argument, which was published in, I think, July 1989 in The National Interest, he pointed to a wave of democratization that had already taken place, and he couldn’t have known that that wave would actually increase in size and velocity pretty dramatically in the years following that, and especially after the fall of the Berlin Wall. But we’ve recently seen a democratic recession around the world. I mean, there’s no indicator that that wave will just keep on rolling inevitably and it’s just another reminder that we have to be humble, and we can’t just expect things to move inexorably in one direction. But yeah, I think he’s right that it has won in the realm of ideas, and this is something I point out often in articles today. The greatest challenger to his thesis is the Chinese system now, and that’s an observation he’s made as well. But I don’t think that system is ready for export.
Matt Johnson: I mean, it’s extremely difficult to imagine Xi Jinping thought, or the interesting blend of state control, totalitarian control, and economic growth that China has been managed to achieve being exported around the world. I don’t think China really wants to do that. China wants to have relations with countries around the world. It’s a very transactional country in that sense. It certainly has a stronger ideology under Xi Jinping than it did under Hu Jintao, but that ideology is really nationalist. So it’s sort of by definition limited to China. It’s not like the Soviet Union, which sought to foment revolution around the world everywhere from Europe to Latin America. So I think that’s a worthwhile distinction. So I still think, yeah, it’s a strong thesis.
Marian Tupy: Right. Liberal democracy and free market capitals produce the best outcome if you are into higher incomes, longer lifespans, fewer children dying, etceteraetera etceteraetera. But of course, sometimes people don’t get to choose, like in Afghanistan or some other hellholes. There’s another element to China, it seems to me. It’s not just that the system is unexportable because it’s partly based on Chinese nationalism. But also, it seems to me, and this would be a very interesting counterfactual, is whether China is able to stay on the frontier of innovation, whether it can continue to innovate and become richer, eventually overtaking the United States of America, for example, in GDP per capita, whilst at the same time not having liberal democracy and not having free market capitals. And because, of course, capitalist relations in China are heavily constricted by the presence of Communist Party goons on the boards of these companies. And of course, there isn’t a freedom of speech and association and thought in China, which I would expect would be quite important in terms of generating economic growth via innovation. So what do you think about that? In other words, it’s one thing if a non-free country catches up with the Western world in terms of living standards.
Marian Tupy: That’s been done in many other places, including Chile, partially South Korea, Taiwan, and so forth. It’s another thing if an authoritarian, non-free country can overtake us in terms of innovation. That shouldn’t happen. But if it does happen, we will have to reevaluate our view of the world, wouldn’t we?
Matt Johnson: Yeah, maybe. I do think it’s worth… Yeah, that’s a good distinction. And also, China faces severe demographic problems right now and a fairly deep economic crisis. I mean, especially after its own real estate bubble sort of popped. And the Chinese stock market saw massive devaluation before sort of recovering recently. So I think once growth slows down, as it inevitably must and as it already has, we’re going to start seeing the sort of assertion of the Chinese middle class more so than we have in the past. I mean, I don’t want to make that conjecture loosely because I really don’t know what will happen in China. I mean, I would have been, I was five years old when Bill Clinton was talking about opening up China and the potential liberalization of China. But if I could go back in time and be my age now, I probably would have expected China to liberalize politically and then it just didn’t do that. So it’s not there’s nothing written in stone. But I do think that the regime is going to be under a lot more pressure as economic growth slows. And I think you’re probably right about technological innovation, although you do see interesting developments like DeepSeek came out recently and rattled American markets and rattled American tech companies like NVIDIA.
Matt Johnson: And they just have so many people and such a large middle class that’s becoming so much more educated that I would be shocked if we didn’t see some impressive innovations out of China. I mean, I’m not sure to what extent it will be able to surpass the West because I do think that a system like that is just so constrictive to thought. And it’s so, and that’s obviously a deep problem. And many educated Chinese were educated in the West. So that might come to an end shortly, especially as tensions between the United States and China explode.
Marian Tupy: Well, I mean, the USSR showed us that it’s possible even within a totalitarian society to make certain scientific breakthroughs, especially if you can steal a lot of technology from the West. For a while, the USSR led in missile technology, again, stealing a lot of intellectual property from the West, but also abducting a lot of the German scientists who worked on Hitler’s missile program. So in terms of nuclear technology and missile technology, they were able to keep up with the West for a very long time, but the rest of the society suffered. Now, if China was able to lead in many of these scientific areas, then I would be worried that my understanding of economics and how economic growth happens is incorrect. But let’s go back just a little bit to Popper. There’s a phrase which you use in the essay, which I didn’t quite understand, and that is the search for recognition. Why is that important in Popper? And what does it mean?
Matt Johnson: It’s a concept that Fukuyama has actually outlined in great detail, like the desire for recognition as a major driver of history.
Marian Tupy: I meant Fukuyama. I apologize.
Matt Johnson: Yeah. Oh, yeah, no, no problem.It’s a Hegelian idea, and Fukuyama’s thesis is deeply Hegelian. Just as an aside, I would say Fukuyama is more of a historicist than Popper. I think Popper might, if he could analyze Fukuyama’s thought today, might take issue with, because it does just seem like a stronger historical claim than Popper ever made. But anyway, that’s an aside that we can get to if you want to. But yeah, the desire for recognition is just the, it’s the acknowledgement that there are human needs that go beyond the satisfaction of material wants and desires. We want to be treated as individuals with worth and agency. We’re willing to sacrifice ourselves for purely abstract goals. This is just a, it’s a concept that Fukuyama really built out in The End of History and The Last Man, which is his book based upon the original essay. And it really matters in the context of the sustainability of liberal democracy, because liberal democracies are the only systems that have so far been able to meet the need for recognition or the desire for recognition on a vast scale. And because they do treat people as autonomous, thinking, rational people, ends in themselves. Unlike dictatorships, which treat people with absolute contempt as expendable.
Matt Johnson: So that’s why, one of the reasons why liberal democracy has lasted as long as it has. But there’s a dark side to that. And that’s because liberal democracy ensures pluralism, it also enables people to believe whatever they want religiously, to go down whatever rabbit holes they want to politically. And oftentimes, when you have the freedom to join these other tribes, when you have the freedom to worship as you see fit, or believe whatever you want about politics, then you will find yourself more committed to those tribes than to the overall society. And so it enables pluralism, liberal democracy does, but pluralism can be a threat to liberal democracy, because people will start saying if you’re a very serious Christian nationalist, for example, you might say, I think our society should be organized along my lines, it should look like my ideal society we should put the Ten Commandments up in every public school classroom, because that’s the foundation of law and morality. And and this is the constant threat that liberal democracy has to navigate. So yeah, I’d say that’s a decent encapsulation, just of how it impacts liberal democracies.
Marian Tupy: Has something changed in a sense that we feel, well, before we get there, one interesting thing I noticed in your essay is that you are not being too concerned. You note that democracy is not in full retreat, that actually, if you look at the numbers, things are not as dire as they seem to the pedestrian observer. What is the argument that you have made?
Matt Johnson: Yeah, well, I think the way I put it in the essay is just if you just read like annual reports from Freedom House, you would think that we’re just like on our way to global authoritarianism. And yeah, if you take a longer historical view, I mean, even just 80 years versus 20 years, yeah, the trend line is still dramatically in favor of liberal democracies. And there’s a lot of data. If you go to our world in data, for example, and just track the number of democracies versus the number of autocracies, and then there are different variants of democracies. There are more open and more closed democracies. The trend toward democratization is undeniable. And I think it’s still an amazing historical achievement. It’s getting rolled back, but I’d still say in the grand sweep of global history, it’s getting rolled back on the margins. But it’s a dangerous and frightening trend. And when you see a country like the United States electing a president who’s expressly hostile toward the exchange of power after four years, then you’re in a pretty dangerous place. So yeah, I don’t take the threats to democracy lightly at all, but I do think we have to have some historical perspective.
Marian Tupy: Yes. And I think part of the problem is that when we hear about democracy in full retreat and collapsing, that may encourage people to think that actually democracy doesn’t work and that it’s okay to abandon it. Whereas the reality is that we are less liberally democratic than we were 20 years ago, but we are much more liberally democratic than we were 40 years ago. But okay, but something has happened in the last, whatever, 15 to 20 years. And some of the trust and some of the belief in liberal democracy certainly has eroded. How is that connected to the issue of recognition?
Matt Johnson: Oh, I think it’s connected in a pretty intimate way. I mean, in the United States, if you look at just the past five or six years on both the left and the right, there has been a dramatic shift toward identity politics. And identity politics is a form of the desire for recognition. If you say that Black Americans have suffered X, Y, and Z throughout the years, which obviously they have, then you mobilize around that axis. The civil rights movement mobilized on that basis. And I would argue that the civil rights movement was working toward more universalist ends, whereas now identity politics tends to be more tribal and it tends to be more reactive than it used to be. I’ve lightened up on identity politics a little bit. I’ve always been very critical of it. But upon… I mean, I read Jonathan Eig’s book about King, the biography about Martin Luther King, and I recognize that identity politics is sort of unavoidable in liberal democracies. You can’t expect people, especially when the United States has the history that it has racially, not to mobilize on the basis of race. It would be unrealistic to demand that.
Matt Johnson: I think we should always work toward a colorblind society. I think we should work toward a more universalist conception of rights and responsibilities and citizenship. But I think it’s kind of unavoidable that identity will sneak in there. The problem over the past few years is that I think it’s really been inflamed. I mean, there’s identitarianism on the right and the left. On the left, there was the sort of explosion of wokeness, especially in 2020, where there was a lot of authoritarianism. People were shouted down for fairly anodyne comments, and editors were churned out of their roles. And this is something that I thought was deeply troubling. And then it was something that Trump and many on the authoritarian right were able to instrumentalize. And they were able to use toward their own identitarian purposes. There’s just this sense that native-born Americans are more completely American than other people. This is something I wrote in a recent article. J.D. Vance likes to say, my family has several generations in this Appalachian plot cemetery, and I plan to be buried there with my own family.
Matt Johnson: He seems to imply that this makes his connection to the United States deeper than the connection of, say, the daughter of undocumented immigrants who was born in Los Angeles. But she’s American. I mean, she’s as American as J.D. Vance. All of these things are forms of identity politics, and they privilege one group over another. And it’s very easy to fall into this trap, especially when you feel like the other side is identitarian. And then that drives people away from a universal conception of citizenship. So yeah, I think it’s been a big problem, and it’s one of the big reasons why people have become less committed to pluralism and the sort of classic American idea E pluribus unum.
Marian Tupy: So I think that we can both agree that working toward universalist values, certainly in terms of colorblind society, for example, just to pick the United States because of its own racial history, but there are analogous situations in other parts of the world, is the right way to go forward. Have you ever thought about why, specifically after 2012, there is this massive outpouring of leftist wokeism, which then, of course, leads to right-wing identity politics? Why precisely? I mean, this really starts in 2013, 2014. You start seeing the first woke protests at Yale and other places. Some people on the right suggest that this is because America has begun to lose religion, and as a consequence, people are seeking recognition in politics. Politics has replaced religion as a sort of gravitational field in people’s lives. Have you thought about that? Or do you disagree?
Matt Johnson: I don’t think I disagree. I do think that the decline of religion is probably going to have some effects like that. I’ve written a lot about what many people regard as a crisis of meaning in Western liberal democracies. I think to some extent that’s overblown. I think there are a lot of people who don’t need to have some sort of superstructure, some sort of belief system that goes beyond just humanism or just beyond their commitment to liberalism or what have you. I don’t think it’s necessary. I think that we’re inclined toward religious belief. I think we do sort of search for things to worship. There were these elements of the woke explosion that seemed deeply religious. I mean, people were. They talked about original sin I mean, people People would have these sort of struggle sessions.
Marian Tupy: They would fall on their knees, for example.
Matt Johnson: Literally fall on their knees. This is something that John McWhorter wrote about. He wrote a book called Woke Racism. It was basically about the religion of wokeness. Yeah, I think that there’s something to be said for that. I think it depends on how you want to define religion. I feel like the word religion is now being used very loosely. But yeah… You call it a meta-belief that people sort of want to, they don’t want to necessarily struggle, Steven Pinker will hate us for saying this, but people don’t necessarily want to struggle step by step toward creating their own meta-structure, that they will rather go out there and pick off the shelf the meta-structure that works for them. Maybe for some of them it’s Catholicism, for some of them it’s Protestantism, for some of them it’s wokeism, for some of them it’s white identity politics. Is that how you see it?
Matt Johnson: Yeah, well, I mean, I think we also live in an era that has been, by historical standards, extremely peaceful and extremely prosperous. And I do think that Fukuyama is right that people search for things to fight over. They search for things to struggle over. And the more prosperous your society is, the more you’re going to be incensed by every perceived inequality or every perceived slight. This is a point that Fukuyama made directly in his book Identity. Just the complaints that you hear from people today would sort of be baffling to people 100 years ago. I mean, like we live in a society…
Marian Tupy: Like a white person on campus wearing a sombrero.
Matt Johnson: Yeah, that sort of thing, absolutely. Or a girl going to her high school prom wearing a Chinese dress. I remember that whole crisis in 2018. Or the girl on Yale’s campus, the famous shrieking girl who just kind of went nuts. I think John Haidt wrote about that whole phenomenon in The Coddling of the American Mind. Yeah, it’s a strange phenomenon. And I remember Yasha Mounk and Fukuyama had a recent conversation and they were talking about how while it’s true that there’s been some stagnation of wages for the middle class in the United States, although I often feel like those statistics are a little skewed because they don’t seem to account for the people who’ve exited the middle class and moved to the upper class. So I think you’re probably in a better position to talk about the economics than I am, I’m sure, coming from the Cato Institute as you do. But yeah, there’s definitely jobs were lost due to globalization or reshuffled. I mean, there’s been some decay in the Rust Belt. It’s called the Rust Belt for a reason. Like these are problems, sure. They’re nothing like the problems that we had 75 years ago. They’re just not in the same ballpark.
Matt Johnson: Yet there’s still this bitterness and this cynicism about our system that is very difficult to account for. And I think the desire for recognition sort of gets re-normed all the time. It doesn’t really matter how much your aggregate conditions have improved when new people come into the world, they have a set of expectations based on their surroundings. And their surroundings, it’s a fairly well-established psychological principle, I think, that people aren’t as concerned in terms of their psychological well-being and their conception of themselves. They’re not as concerned about their overall aggregate level of well-being. They’re more concerned about it relative to their neighbors. If you see your neighbor with a bigger house or a bigger boat, then you’ll feel like you’ve been cheated. And this is the language that Donald Trump uses. It’s very zero-sum. The United States has been cheated. I think he said in his first inaugural address that their factory strewn across the landscape like tombstones. It was called the American Carnage Speech for a reason. And he traffics in this idea that everything is horrible. Everything is bad. And it just doesn’t really track with countless measures of human well-being as Pinker has documented so effectively in Enlightenment Now.
Marian Tupy: Yeah, I think that what he has recognized is right-wingers want to feel like victims just as much as left-wingers.
Matt Johnson: Absolutely.
Marian Tupy: Now we have two political parties which are basically saying that America is a horrible place to live. Whereas, say, in the 1980s, Reagan was still talking about Shining City on the Hill and mankind’s best hope. Whereas Donald Trump now refers to America very often as a failed nation, a shithole, and whatever else.
Matt Johnson: Yeah, it’s incredible.
Marian Tupy: Well, a part of the problem is that when it comes to economics, for example, you mentioned the hollowing out of places like Detroit. Yeah, they have hollowed out partly because many of the car manufacturers have actually moved to the American South because it was much cheaper to produce cars there and there were no powerful trade unions. Or you try to explain to people that actually China accounts for a tiny, tiny percentage of the number of jobs lost, that something like 85% of jobs lost in manufacturing had been lost to automatization, which is what we want. We want the robots to do these dangerous and repetitive jobs. We want people to have more interesting jobs, more intellectually stimulating jobs in, say, for example, service industry or whatever. But I think you raised a subject that I’m very interested in, and maybe we can end on this discussion, the crisis of meaning. So I don’t know what to make of it. Everybody, including people that I admire and respect, seem to think that crisis of meaning is real, but I don’t know what that means, partly because I don’t know if we have enough evidence to suggest there is a crisis of meaning.
Marian Tupy: Is there more crisis of meaning than there was 100 years ago or even 50 years ago? And what does it really mean? Have you thought about this issue and what are your thoughts?
Matt Johnson: Yeah, I have. I’ve written about it too. Just as a sort of, to lay the groundwork for this conversation, I just have to say that in my own life, I mean, I’m an atheist. I don’t think I’ve ever been absorbed by wokeness or some ideology. Maybe you could say I’m a radical liberal or something. I don’t know. But I find meaning in my work. I find meaning in my friends and family. I find it insulting that people are endlessly telling me that I have to have some sort of, yeah, I mentioned the word superstructure earlier, some larger than, like foundational morality. It has to be Christian or Judeo-Christian or it has to be something else. There was a book recently published about how liberalism could solve the crisis of meaning, how we can essentially turning liberalism into its own religion. And I wrote a critical essay about that in Quillette because I think it accepts or it grants the premise that there is a crisis of meaning. I think you’re absolutely right to question where this claim comes from, what it’s grounded in, what are the measures?
Matt Johnson: I mean, Steven Pinker, is he facing a crisis of meaning because he doesn’t have any belief in the supernatural? And how do people know the minds of the people who say that they don’t need something like religion to live lives of meaning? There’s something extremely presumptuous at work there. So yeah, I’m not sure how it’s supposed to be quantified. And people say, oh, well, look at the explosion of conspiracism and look at what Joe Rogan talks about every other day. And there are people who’ve become interested in pseudoscience and astrology and things like that. But humanity has been crammed with pseudoscience and superstition since as long as we’ve been around. It’s, if anything, an argument I’ve made in Quillette and elsewhere. I think the ambient level of secularism or the ambient has increased over the centuries, and I think the ambient level of religiosity has gone down. It’s just very difficult to compare Western societies today to the way they were a few hundred years ago when people were being hanged for blasphemy, when women were being killed as witches.
Matt Johnson: It does seem like we’ve actually secularized. And look at what our societies have done just in living memory. Look at the vast increase in material well-being, the vast increases in improvements in life expectancy, literacy, everything you can imagine. All of that I find very inspiring. And I think if we start talking about democracy and capitalism, what have you, in that grander historical context, then maybe we can make some inroads against the cynicism and the nihilism that have sort of taken root, the lack of trust in institutions. So yeah, I don’t know that there’s a crisis of meaning, but I doubt it.
Marian Tupy: Well, certainly that’s what we are trying to do at Human Progress, which is to try to contextualize liberal democracy and free market capitalism in history and show people with data how much better off they are than they used to be and hope that they will derive from it the correct lessons. And hopefully this particular conversation will help people a little bit in order to, as I said, appreciate liberal democracy and capitalism a little better. So with that, I want to thank you very much for your time. It’s been fascinating and best of luck in your future endeavors.
Matt Johnson: Yeah, thank you so much. It was a lot of fun.