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Today, I’m very lucky to speak to Matt Johnson, who recently had a fascinating essay in Quillette titled “The Open Society and Its New Enemies: What Karl Popper’s classic can teach us about the threats facing democracies today.”

So Matt, could you tell us who Karl Popper was and what this big book is about?

Popper is mainly known for his scientific work, especially his ideas around falsifiability. He published a book called The Open Society and Its Enemies in 1945. He started writing it right after the Nazi annexation of Austria. It’s a very powerful and clarifying set of principles for anybody interested in liberal democracy and the broader project of building open societies around the world today.

So, why talk about liberal democracies and openness? It is our conjecture here at Human Progress that openness is very important. Have you ever thought or written about the connection between openness, liberal democracy, and the scope and speed of human progress?

That’s been a major theme of my work for a long time. I think there is a strong connection between the development of liberal democracy and open societies throughout the 20th century and human progress. Liberal democracy, unlike its authoritarian rivals, has error correction mechanisms built in. It allows for pluralism in society. It allows people to cooperate without the threat of violence or coercion. There’s also the economic element: Liberal democracy facilitates free trade and open exchange because it’s rule-based and law-bound, which are important conditions for economic development.

Human Progress also assumes that there is some directionality in history. We can say that living in 2025 is better than living in 1025 or 25 AD. But you begin your essay by raising the dangers of what Karl Popper called historicism, or a belief in the inevitability of certain political or economic outcomes. Can you unwind that for us? What is the difference between acknowledging the directionality of human history and historicism?

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—a glorious worker state or some other utopia—then it doesn’t matter how much pain you have to inflict in the meantime. You’re not treating your citizens as ends whose rights must be protected; you’re treating them as raw material, as characters in this grand historical story.

The second concern is that historicism is anti-scientific because you can hammer any existing data into a form that fits your historicist prophecy.

Marx wrote that the unfolding of history is inevitable. In his view, leaders were just responsible for making that unavoidable transition easier. That’s the central conceit of historicism. If you take a Popperian view, 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 paradigm you already know everything about. You don’t know what the future holds.

Stalin would say, anytime there was a setback, that it was all part of the same plan. It was all just globalist saboteurs attacking the Soviet Union, or it was some part of the grand historical unfolding that moving toward the dictatorship of the proletariat. There’s no sense in which new information can change the course of a government with historicist ideas.

That differs from a general idea of progress. We have a lot of economic data that suggests 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. That’s a huge historical victory, it’s unprecedented in the history of Western Europe.

So, there are good reasons to believe that we’ve progressed. And that’s the core difference between the observation and acknowledgment of progress and historicism, which is much less grounded in empirical reality.

Right. The way I understand human progress is backward-looking. We can say that we are richer than we were in the past. Fewer women die in childbirth. Fewer infants die. We have fewer casualties in wars, et cetera. But we don’t know where we are going.

Yeah, absolutely. There were moments during the Cold War that could have plunged us into nuclear war. It makes no sense to try to cram every idea into some existing paradigm or prophecy. All we can do is incrementally move toward a better world.

This brings us to another big name in your piece: Frank Fukuyama. Tell me how you read Fukuyama.

Fukuyama is perhaps the most misread political science writer of our time. There are countless lazy journalists who want to add intellectual heft to their article about some new crisis, and they’ll say, “well, it turns out Fukuyama was wrong. There are still bad things happening in the world.” That’s a fundamental misreading of Fukuyama’s argument. He never said that bad things would stop happening. He never said there would be an end to war, poverty, or political upheaval. His argument was that liberal capitalist democracy is the most sustainable political and economic system, that it had proven itself against the great ideological competitors in the 20th century, and that it would continue to do so in the future.

I think it’s still a live thesis, it hasn’t been proven or disproven. I suppose if the entire world collapsed into totalitarianism and remained that way, then yeah, Fukuyama was wrong. But right now, there’s still a vibrant democratic world competing against the authoritarian world, and I think that liberal democracy will continue to outperform.

You use a phrase in the essay I didn’t quite understand: “the desire for recognition.” What does it mean, and why is it important to Fukuyama?

The desire for recognition is the acknowledgment that human desires go beyond material concerns. We want to be treated as individuals with worth and agency, and we are willing to sacrifice ourselves for purely abstract goals. Liberal democracies are the only systems so far that have met the desire for recognition on a vast scale. Liberal democracies treat people as autonomous, rational ends in themselves, unlike dictatorships, which treat people as expendable, and that’s one of the reasons why liberal democracy has lasted as long as it has.

However, there’s a dark side. Because liberal democracy enables pluralism, people can believe whatever they want religiously and go down whatever political rabbit holes they want to. And, oftentimes, when you have the freedom to join these other tribes, you find yourself more committed to those tribes than to the overall society. If you’re a very serious Christian nationalist, you might want society organized along the lines of the Ten Commandments because that, in your view, is the foundation of morality. So, pluralism, which is one of the strengths of liberal democracy, also creates constant threats that liberal democracy has to navigate.

I noticed in your essay that you are not too concerned. You note that democracy is not in full retreat and that, if you look at the numbers, things are not as dire as they seem. What is the argument?

If you just read annual reports from Freedom House, you would think that we’re on our way to global authoritarianism. However, if you take a longer historical view, even just 80 years versus 20 years, the trend line is still dramatically in favor of liberal democracies. It’s still an amazing historical achievement. It’s getting rolled back, but in the grand sweep of history, it’s getting rolled back on the margins.

Still, it’s a dangerous and frightening trend. And you’re in a dangerous place when you see a country like the United States electing a president who is expressly hostile toward the exchange of power after four years. So, the threats to democracy are real, but we need to have some historical perspective.

So, we are more liberally democratic than we were 40 years ago, but something has happened in the last 15 to 20 years. Some of the trust and belief in liberal democracy has eroded.

How is that connected to the issue of recognition?

In the United States, if you look at just the past five or six years, there has been a dramatic shift toward identity politics, which is a form of the desire for recognition.

On the left, there was an 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 on the right, there’s this sense that native-born Americans are more completely American than other people. All of these things are forms of identity politics, and they privilege one group over another and drive people away from a universal conception of citizenship. That’s one of the big reasons why people have become less committed to pluralism and the classic American idea of E pluribus unum.

Have you ever thought about why, specifically after 2012, there was this massive outpouring of wokeness and identity politics? 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.

I think it could be a consequence of the decline of religion. 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 crisis is overblown. Many people don’t need to have some sort of superstructure or belief system that goes beyond humanism or their commitment to liberalism or what have you.

However, I also think that we’re inclined toward religious belief. We search for things to worship. People don’t really want to create their own belief systems; they would rather go out there and pick a structure off the shelf. For some, it’s Catholicism or Protestantism, and for others, it’s Wokeism or white identity politics. And there were elements of the woke explosion that seemed deeply religious. People talked about original sin and literally fell on their knees.

We also live in an era that has been, by historical standards, extremely peaceful and prosperous, and I think Fukuyama is right that people search for things to fight over. The more prosperous your society is, the more you’ll be incensed by minor inequalities or slights. The complaints you hear from people today would be baffling to people one hundred years ago.

I also think the desire for recognition 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 it’s a well-established psychological principle that people are less concerned about their absolute level of well-being than their well-being relative to their neighbors. If you see your neighbor has a bigger house or bigger boat, you feel like you’ve been cheated. And this is also the language that Donald Trump uses. It’s very zero-sum, and he traffics in this idea that everything is horrible.

You raised a subject that I’m very interested in, which is the crisis of meaning. I don’t know what to make of it. Everybody, including people I admire and respect, seems to think there is a crisis of meaning, but I don’t know what that means.

Is there more of a crisis of meaning today than there was 100 years ago or even 50 years ago? And what does it really mean? Have you thought about this issue?

You’re right to question where this claim comes from. How can people who claim there is a crisis of meaning see inside the minds of the people who say that they don’t need religion to live a meaningful life? There’s something extremely presumptuous there, and I’m not sure how it’s supposed to be quantified.

People say, well, look at the explosion of conspiracism and pseudoscience. And there are people who’ve become interested in astrology and things like that. But humanity has been crammed with pseudoscience and superstition for as long as we’ve been around. It’s very difficult to compare Western societies today to the way they were a few hundred years ago when people were killed for blasphemy and witchcraft.

And look at what our societies have accomplished in living memory. Look at the vast increase in material well-being, the vast improvements in life expectancy, literacy, everything you can imagine. I find all that very inspiring. I think if we start talking about democracy and capitalism in that grander historical context, then maybe we can make some inroads against the cynicism and the nihilism that have taken root.

 

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Summary: Throughout history, golden ages have emerged when societies embraced openness, curiosity, and innovation. In his book Peak Human, Johan Norberg explores how civilizations from Song China to the Dutch Republic rose through trade, intellectual freedom, and cultural exchange—only to decline when fear and control replaced dynamism. He warns that our current prosperity hinges not on external threats but on whether we choose to uphold or abandon the openness that made it possible.

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“Every act of major technological innovation … is an act of rebellion not just against conventional wisdom but against existing practices and vested interests,” says economic historian Joel Mokyr. He could have said the same about artistic, business, scientific, intellectual, and other forms of innovation.

Swedish scholar Johan Norberg’s timely new book—Peak Human: What We Can Learn from the Rise and Fall of Golden Ages—surveys historical episodes in which such acts of rebellion produced outstanding civilizations. He highlights what he calls “golden ages” or historical peaks of humanity ranging from ancient Athens and China under the Song dynasty (960-1279 AD) to the Dutch Republic of the 16th and 17th centuries and the current Anglosphere.

What qualifies as a golden age? According to Norberg, societies that are open, especially to trade, people, and intellectual exchange produce these remarkable periods. They are characterized by optimism, economic growth, and achievements in numerous fields that distinguish them from other contemporary societies.

The civilizations that created golden ages imitated and innovated. Ancient Rome appropriated and adapted Greek architecture and philosophy, but it was also relatively inclusive of immigrants and outsiders: being Roman was a political identity, not an ethnic one. The Abbasid Caliphate that began more than a thousand years ago was the most prosperous place in the world. It located its capital, Baghdad, at the “center of the universe” and from there promoted intellectual tolerance, knowledge, and free trade to produce a flourishing of science, knowledge, and the arts that subsequent civilizations built upon.

China under the Song dynasty was especially impressive. “No classic civilization came as close to unleashing an industrial revolution and creating the modern world as Song China,” writes Norberg.

But that episode, like others in the past, did not last: “All these golden ages experienced a death-to-Socrates moment,’” Norberg observes, “when they soured on their previous commitment to open intellectual exchange and abandoned curiosity for control.”

The status quo is always threatening: the “Elites who have benefited enough from the innovation that elevated them want to kick away the ladder behind them,” while “groups threatened by change try to fossilize culture into an orthodoxy.” Renaissance Italy, for example, came to an end when Protestants and Catholics of the Counter-Reformation clashed and allied themselves with their respective states, thus facilitating repression.

Today we are living in a golden age that has its origins in 17th-century England, which in turn drew from the golden age of the Dutch Republic. It was in 18th-century England that the Industrial Revolution began, producing an explosion of wealth and an escape from mass poverty in much of Western Europe and its offshoots like the United States.

And it was the United States that, since the last century, has served as the backbone of an international system based on openness and the principles that produced the Anglosphere’s success. As such, most of the world is participating in the current golden age, one of unprecedented global improvements in income and well-being.

Donald Trump says he wants to usher in a golden age and appeals to a supposedly better past in the United States. To achieve his goal, he says the United States does not need other countries and that the protectionism he is imposing on the world is necessary.

Trump has not learned the lessons of Norberg’s book. One of the most important is that the factors that determine the continuation of a golden age are not external, such as a pandemic or a supposed clash of civilizations. Rather, says Norberg, the critical factor is how each civilization deals with its own internal clashes, and the decision to remain or not at a historical peak.

A Spanish-language version of this article was published by El Comercio in Peru on 5/6/2025.

Summary: While we are witnessing significant human progress across many indicators, the trend in democracy is less promising. The level of democracy enjoyed by the average citizen globally has been declining steadily since the 2010s, returning to levels last seen in the 1980s. This regression, coupled with the rise of autocracies and their increasing economic influence, particularly in China, poses a serious threat to global democracy.

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The price of Liberty is eternal vigilance.

Thomas Jefferson

While we are seeing human progress across many well-being indicators, on the dimension of freedom and democracy, the trend is less clear in recent decades. Reports from the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute show three major trends regarding the decline of the global levels of democracy.

First, the global level of democracy, as measured by a population-weighted average level of the V-Dem’s Liberal Democracy Indices, has been declining steadily since the 2010s. By 2022, the level of democracy enjoyed by the average global citizen deteriorated to 1986 levels. In the Asia-Pacific region, the level of democracy fell back to levels last recorded in 1978.

While we can still say that there has been global progress in democracy compared with the early 1970s, when the “third wave of democratization” began, the decline of democracy in the last decade largely wiped out the 35 years of improvement.

Second, the number of countries that moved from democracy toward autocracy (the “autocratizers”) over the last decade is far greater than the number of countries moving from autocracy toward democracy (the “democratizers”). In 2022, there was a record number of 42 autocratizers, containing 43 percent of the world’s population. In comparison, the number of democratizing countries was 14, with only 2 percent of the world’s population. This is a record low number last seen in 1973—50 years ago.

Third, the global balance of power has also been shifting significantly in favor of autocracies. In particular, autocracies accounted for 46 percent of global GDP (in purchasing power parity) in 2022, up from 24 percent in 1992. Trade between democracies was 47 percent of world trade in 2022, down from 74 percent in 1998, with an increasing share of world trade happening with and between autocracies. Democracies’ trade dependency on autocracies grew from 21 percent of world trade in 1999 to 35 percent in 2022. The share of between-autocracies trade tripled from 6 percent of world trade in 1992 to almost 18 percent in 2022.

The Rise of China played a major role in the shifting balance of economic and trade power. In purchasing power parity terms, China’s GDP surpassed the United States around the year 2014, making a closed autocracy the largest economy in the world. As a share of global GDP, China rose from 4.4 percent in 1992 to 18.5 percent in 2022. China also accounts for a significant part of the trade pattern changes, with its share of global trade reaching almost 15 percent and being a major trading partner for many autocracies and democracies.

Political scientists have argued that great powers’ influence on the structure of the international system is important in affecting the trajectories of democracies and authoritarian regimes. The implications of the rise of China for the fate of democracy is still an unfolding story.

Overall, these trends are alarming and worth more attention from people who care about democracy and human progress. The progress of political freedom is fundamental for human progress in other areas. It is, therefore, possible that human progress in general could face decline if the trend of autocratization continues.

While the general trend of human progress in the realm of political freedom still prevails – when we look at it from a time horizon of more than 40 years – we should also recognize that progress in freedom is never guaranteed. Freedom is “fragile” and must be, as President Reagan pointed out, “fought for and defended constantly by each generation.”