📖 Johan Norberg: How golden ages are created, how they end - and what it says about our time

Johan Norberg has a new book out: Peak Human: What We Can Learn from History's Greatest Civilizations. It can be purchased from Amazon or ordered directly from the publisher Atlantic Books.

Any decent artist could have created realistic characters, with volume, physical weight and a spatial presence, with the use light and color to suggest distance, because that is after all, what the world looks like. So why was the Renaissance painter Giotto the first one to do it in 900 years?

Or take the flying shuttle, which helped to make weaving much more productive during the Industrial Revolution. It required no special knowledge and only took some string and two wooden boxes on either side. And yet, for 5,000 years, no weaver tried it.

Why do we suddenly get an explosion of creativity and progress in certain places and moments – and why do they end? That is what I examine in my book Peak Human: What We Can Learn from the Rise and Fall of Golden Ages (Atlantic Books). 

I have learned that ages become golden because they imitate and innovate. They first emerge because of cheating. They didn’t come up with all the innovations that made them prosper; instead they took them from others.

Athenian, Italian and Dutch merchants picked up new ideas on their business trips. Like the Borg of Star Trek, the Romans constantly absorbed peoples, ideas and methods by conquest, and Abbasid Baghdad actively sponsored a translation project to lay their hands on the world’s knowledge and science.

But there is a limit to how far imitation can get you. To make this progress self-propelling, these cultures had to combine these inputs with their own thoughts to create innovations, from higher agricultural yields to artistic rebellions. This takes inclusivity back home. People have to be allowed to try new things. Free speech, free markets and a rule of law that constrains the arbitrary actions of rulers leave room for this. 

But get Giotto and the flying shuttle, it takes something more: a broader culture of optimism. Innovation is difficult and controversial, and the results are never guaranteed. Therefore, you need a sense that there is hope and possibility, and you need role models around you who have shown the way, to make it seem like it is worth trying. Others to be inspired by, learn from, and to compete with.

This progress sometimes became self-sustaining because, at a certain point, it started transforming the self-identity of these cultures. That is why we often see clusters of creativity, like philosophy in Athens, art during the Renaissance, classical music in Vienna and technology in Silicon Valley.

Pessimism, the sense that it is hopeless, is a self-fulfilling prophecy. This is a clue to the decline and fall of golden ages.

It is as if history has a Great Status Quo Filter (similar to the hypothesis about the Fermi paradox on why we have not encountered alien life despite the likelihood that it exists). Civilizations in every era have tried to break away from the shackles of oppression and scarcity, but increasingly they faced opposite forces, and sooner or later these dragged them back to earth.

Elites who have benefited from the innovation that elevated them want to kick away the ladder behind them, groups threatened by change try to fossilize culture into an orthodoxy, and aggressive neighbors are attracted to the wealth of the achievers and try to kill the goose to steal its golden eggs. However, outsiders can kill and destroy, but they can’t kill curiosity and creativity. Only we can do that to ourselves.

When under threat, we often seek stability and predictability, shutting out that which is different and unpredictable. All these golden ages experienced a death-to-Socrates moment in times of crisis, when they soured on their previous commitment to open intellectual exchange. They started to support strongmen, control the economy and abandon international exchange. This made the fear of disaster self-fulfilling, since those barriers limited access to other possibilities and restricted the adaptation and innovation that could have helped them deal with the threat.

Where does that leave our civilization? The present Anglosphere age, started by the Industrial Revolution and carried on by the American Revolution and the liberal world order after the Second World War has been the most golden so far, since it has also been global. For the first time, improvements in living standards and opportunities have not been limited to one region.

Since 1820, the share of people in extreme poverty globally has been reduced from more than 8 out of 10 to fewer than 1 out of 10, and life expectancy shot up from 30 to 74.

As we have learned from history, however, nothing is forever. The question is, is the great filter in front of us or behind us? My conclusion is that it is never behind us once and for all, because the forces of reaction and tribalism exists within human nature and we carry it with us wherever we go. It can return and threaten us at the most unexpected moment, but it does not mean that it will win.

I don’t think that the American-led world order will be destroyed from the outside. There are too many countries and populations who see their interest in open trade and a rules-based order, and that choice gives them more innovation and growth in the long run. But it can all be torn down from the inside, by regulations and unsustainable debts, by erecting walls, trade barriers and unconstitutional strongman rule.  

As Abraham Lincoln said about the risk of an end to the American experiment in 1838: “It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”

That is our choice today as well. But we have an advantage over earlier golden ages, because we can learn from their successes and their mistakes. We know what we should do, to try and rediscover that sense of life, that sense of wonder, and fight for openness and liberty, to rebuild a culture of optimism. In the end, golden ages are a choice.

Johan Norberg

Peak Human: What We Can Learn from History's Greatest Civilizations. can be purchased from Amazon or ordered directly from the publisher Atlantic Books.