Western civilisation is an idea worth

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

Aug 3rd 2018

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By Joe Lonsdale

In recent decades, the idea of “Western civilisation” has found few fans on
American campuses. In a haze of ethnic studies programmes and Stanford's chants
of "Hey, hey, ho, ho, ‘Western Civ’ has got to go!", many people have lost sight of
the principles that make “the West” exceptional.

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.

Instead of being the source of society’s ills, the values of Western civilisation
are a part of the cure

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. The illiberal economy,
particularly in America, has given rise to a host of ills:

The West’s new framework of property rights and political freedoms unleashed
a surge of creative energy

* Restrictive zoning ordinances make the cost of living in high-growth cities

prohibitive. This hurts millions of people and shuts tens of millions of others out of
the most dynamic areas of our country.

*The healthcare system is like a cartel that limits new medical schools, doctors, and
innovative forms of competition. Cronyism, ludicrous tort law, local monopolies by
hospitals, and a dense mesh of rules and restrictions create a “cost disease” that
wastes $1 trillion a year.

* The prison system, fueled in part by a misguided “war on drugs,” incarcerates

millions of people—disproportionately minorities—with horrific recidivism rates,
ruining lives and communities.

* Education, a national experiment in centralised control and funding, is unequal,

mediocre and leaves students unprepared for a complex economy.

* A maze of over a million federal regulatory commands, with thousands of new

“guidance documents” released every year, and a comparably vast net of state-level
regulation, make entrepreneurship expensive and difficult. This regulatory sand-trap
favours the wealthy and powerful (who can afford armies of lawyers) over small
businesses.

Though global prosperity has risen in recent decades, incomes in the West for all but
the wealthiest have stagnated. This is in part due to global competition, but also
because of failures of market liberalism at home. As in the feudal system before
liberalism, the strong prey upon the weak. The areas where our society is failing
people are those where policy does not enable bottom-up, market-driven innovation.
Put simply: The West is failing precisely where its core liberal values do not hold
sway.

In healthcare, education, the affordability of cities, immigration and regulation, the

Western, best-ideas-win system of innovation is stymied. Unaccountable bureaucrats
rule vast areas of society and the economy at the behest of vested interests, an
arbitrary elite who run major businesses and investment funds. These failing areas
are reminiscent of pre-liberal society, when parts of the economy were divvied up by
royal privileges.
Society’s failure to adhere to liberal tenets of open markets and a contest of
ideas extracts a painful toll on the economy

The tragedy of our generation is that our dynamic innovation economy and the most
pressing needs of our society are ships passing in the night. The West must enable
entrepreneurs to solve our biggest problems by testing ideas in competing
innovation zones, such as delivering cheap, high-quality healthcare, preparing
students for the workforce, building housing and reducing recidivism.

The question is not how the elite should run the school, hospital, or prison—that’s
top-down thinking. Instead, the question is how to create the conditions for bottom-
up, market incentives to enable our best-and-brightest to innovate and compete.

We must create policy and incentive frameworks so that a young genius, woman or
man, who is not connected to power but happens to have the best idea, can build a
team, raise capital and get to work. Only in this way can a bright person out-
compete failing institutions.

That’s what competitive markets deliver. But our system is increasingly rigged and
extractive; it must be free and open.

As pre-Enlightenment modes of value-signaling, tribalism and power-politics come

to the fore on campus and social media, we must reaffirm our commitment to
Western liberal values by actually putting them into practice. Only a rational order
which enshrines individual rights to person and property, and expands opportunities
for all, will create the stability and economic progress necessary to quell populist
discontent.

The tragedy of our generation is that our dynamic innovation economy and the
most pressing needs of our society are ships passing in the night

Unsurprisingly the anti-liberal, top-down parts of our society are experiencing cost-
disease and decay. The West enabled a market order where the best ideas win, no
matter whose idea it was. We need to remind ourselves of how unusual the miracle
of our political economy is and enact its lessons. Only then can we save the concept
of “Western civilisation” and spread its benefits of freedom and prosperity—not just
for people in the West, but for everyone.

______________

Joe Lonsdale is an American entrepreneur and technology investor. He co-founded

Palantir, Addepar, OpenGov and other companies, and is a partner at 8VC, his
venture capital fund. He is also a founder of the Cicero Institute, to help
policymakers and entrepreneurs work together on society’s challenges.
Where democracy is most at risk
Four lessons from EIU’s new ranking of democracies
Feb 14th 2024
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In theory this year should be a triumphant one for democracy. More people are
expected to vote in national elections in 2024 than ever before. But many
elections will be problematic. This year’s democracy index published by eiu, our
sister company, shows that only 43 of the more than 70 elections are expected to be
fully free and fair.

Each year eiu grades 167 countries and territories on a scale of ten according to the
strength of their democratic practices, including how fairly they run elections and
how well they protect civil liberties. It then groups them into four categories: full
democracies, flawed democracies, hybrid regimes and authoritarian regimes. The
latest report, published on February 15th, shows that less than 8% of the world’s
population live in full democracies, and that 39.4% are under authoritarian rule—up
from 36.9% in 2022. Below are four lessons from the report, including what the
index reveals about forthcoming elections.

We start with country-level data. Norway remains the most democratic country, a
position it has occupied for 14 years. (All five of the Nordic countries are among the
top ten.) Afghanistan is at the bottom for a third consecutive year. The Taliban,
unsurprisingly, score close to zero in most of eiu’s measures of democratic health.

No country improved by more than half a point. But eiu promoted Greece, The
Economist’s country of the year in 2023, to its full-democracy category after
successful parliamentary, regional and political-party elections last year. The biggest
decliners were Gabon and Niger, which both experienced coups in 2023.

Our next chart zooms out to regions. Western Europe remains the most democratic
place on Earth: 71% of western European countries included in the index are full
democracies. Only Turkey is a hybrid regime. (eiu counts it as part of western
Europe because it belongs to the un’s Group of Western European and Other States.)

The scores for every other region declined. The average score for sub-Saharan
Africa dropped to its lowest since the index began in 2006. Latin America fell by the
most, and recorded its eighth consecutive drop. El Salvador, where Nayib Bukele
ran for re-election as president in defiance of the constitution (and easily won
earlier this month), was the worst performer in the region.

image: the economist

Our third chart shows the global trend. The average score of 5.23 for 2023 is the
lowest since the index began. The decline started in 2016 and was made worse by
the curtailment of civil liberties during the pandemic.

In 2023 war and conflict further undermined global democracy. The war in Ukraine
is weakening its already fragile democratic institutions (though it remains far more
democratic than Russia, the country that invaded it in 2022). Azerbaijan’s conquest
of Nagorno-Karabakh, a separatist ethnic-Armenian enclave, in September damaged
both its own score and that of Armenia. The civil war in Sudan and Israel’s war with
Hamas both threaten security and democracy in the region.

What does all this mean for this year’s elections? In the most democratic countries,
such as Iceland and Britain, voters will get to choose their next governments. In
Russia, one of the least democratic countries holding elections this year, the only
question is whether the results will be as visibly fraudulent as they were in 2021. In
countries classed as flawed democracies, such as India and America, elections are
still expected to be free and fair, though by other criteria in the index, such as
political culture and governance, these places still have weaknesses.

More than half the world’s people live in countries that are holding elections this
year. But EIU’s index shows that in democracy, quality trumps quantity.■