Good News Is Unplanned

Monday, November 2nd, 2015

Good news is unplanned, according to Matt Ridley’s The Evolution of Everything — which discusses the evolution of government:

States emerged from protection rackets in which a gang monopolizing violence demanded payment of goods and services — taxes — in exchange for promises to defend local farmers and artisans from predation by rival gangs. “Tudor monarchs and the Taliban are cut from exactly the same cloth,” summarizes Ridley.

But two to three centuries ago, the fractured polities of Western Europe provided an open, speculative space where novel ideas about property rights, free trade, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, and limits on government could mutate and grow. Where those bottom-up conceptual mutations took hold, technological innovation sped forward, incomes rose, and civil liberties were recognized. Once established, liberal societies are veritable evolution machines that frenetically generate new mutations and swiftly recombine them to produce a vast array of new products, services, and social institutions that enable ever more people to flourish. So far liberal societies are outcompeting—in the sense of being richer and more appealing—those polities that are closer to the original protection rackets.

“Perhaps,” Ridley hopefully suggests, “the state is now evolving steadily towards benign and gentle virtue.” He adds, “Perhaps not.”

Comments

  1. Bomag says:

    Once established, liberal societies are veritable evolution machines that frenetically generate new mutations and swiftly recombine them to produce a vast array of new products, services, and social institutions that enable ever more people to flourish.

    Egad; they also evolve ever more ways to physically kill, maim, and poison; psychologically they evolve ever more ways to depress, hound, and sterilize.

    Liberal societies evolve to be demographically helpless patsies that are looted by the previous protection rackets.

  2. Bob Sykes says:

    In their theory of punctuated equilibrium, Eldredge and Gould argue that stratigraphic evidence shows that evolution only occurs after extinction events that remove much of the biota. The survivors are free to evolve to fill the empty niches, and once the niches are filled natural selection ensures that further evolution is suppressed.

    The boot stamping on a face forever.

  3. Lucklucky says:

    False. There aren’t any Liberal (in the European sense) Democracies today remaining. They are all Social Democracies. And Social Democracies will build the near-future Totalitarian Democracies.

    Social Democracies will evolve into something akin to George Orwell’s 1984, much worse than any Tudor.

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