The Enlightenment Isn't Dead, Yet
Turning our back on the culture that built civilization will stifle progress and sow poverty, decline and conflict, at home and abroad
Tony Morley, December 12th, 2025
“The solution is to embrace leaders and policies that turn outward, not inward; and that embrace freedom, not control.”
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Today, we look back on the last two hundred years from the longest-lived, most wealthy, and materially prosperous time in human history. Never before has the average global citizen had a longer, healthier, more abundant life, or buried fewer children prematurely.
Few people would prefer poverty, sickness, hunger, material want, war, restrictions of freedom and the death of half their young children; to prosperity, health, a full belly, material abundance, freedom and happy young children growing into healthy adults.
To quote Steven Pinker, “Most people agree that life is better than death. Health is better than sickness. Sustenance is better than hunger. Abundance is better than poverty. Peace is better than war. Safety is better than danger. Freedom is better than tyranny.”
While most citizens of the West live in a far freer and more prosperous world compared to their ancestors of just two generations ago, they appear to have largely and collectively forgotten the foundation on which the West built the cultural infrastructure that delivered the prosperity of the present, from the crushing living standards and totalitarian control of the past.
Since the beginning of the Enlightenment, first in the late 17th century and continuing through the 18th century, the average human condition has improved dramatically. Between 1800 and 2025, average global life expectancy climbed from 30 years to over 74 years, while global extreme poverty fell from 80-90% to a little over 8% today. Over that same period, global child mortality fell from roughly 40% to well under 4%, while the number of mothers who died in childbirth declined from more than 1,000 mothers lost per 100,000 live births in Sweden in 1751 to just 17 per 100,000 in the United States today. Life expectancy in the United States was just 39 years at the end of the 18th Century, lower than the lowest national life expectancies in the world today, Nigeria, Chad, South Sudan, and the Central African Republic, all with life expectancies in 2025 over 50 years.
These standards of living are near-universal in desire and relatively easy to quantify objectively. They largely bridge cultures, the color of people's skin and the place of their birth. While we can argue about many things, the desire for access to a long and healthy life, clean water and a full stomach are universal. The Enlightenment fostered, and helped push forward into the future, a raft of social, economic and political systems that quite literally transformed civilization for the better. Concepts, and the benefits of those concepts we take for granted, from reason and scientific enquiry, to liberty and equality before the state and law, and representative government — the Enlightenment was a keystone in humanity’s journey toward human flourishing.
It's difficult to imagine, as a median citizen living in the West, with indoor plumbing, relatively free speech and expression, and fresh eggs in the fridge, what life was like before the Enlightenment. It was a life of war, total government and religious control, sickness, hunger, cold, ignorance and crippling immiseration. In the century preceding and into the beginning of the Enlightenment, tens of millions of humans suffered and died in war, religious persecution, and the hunger and sickness of perpetual dearth and ignorance. Total government control was near universal; the concept of liberty, personal rights, and the basic freedoms we largely take for granted today were enjoyed exclusively by royalty and the wealthiest individuals; the rest toiled under totalitarian rule. This was a world without freedom of speech, free expression, self-determination, or the right to participate in shaping the future of your country.
Globally, there are innumerable value structures and political and economic methods through which people individually and collectively try to achieve objective and subjective progress; however, the ways in which the good life is strived for are not by any means equal in their outcome. For thousands of years, humanity has collectively run countless inadvertent large-scale experiments on how to live together, from monarchy to democracy and from communism to capitalism. In any case, whether the outcomes were carefully documented or not, each modus operandi at the scale of a country either pushed human progress and living standards forward or resulted in individual and collective stagnation or decline.
Broadly speaking, we can today, look back across a rich historical record of these various ways in which groups of people have collaborated and governed, and compare their modes of governance with the resulting living standards for the average person. That said, only in the last few hundred years has humanity made real progress in fostering the conditions for the average global citizen to lead a better life.
Countries where people and government built and maintained the rule of law, the protection of property rights, strong institutions, a focus on science, technology, freedom of expression and worship, free trade and markets, and global interconnections were, and remain today, home to the most prosperous people, with the highest living standards, the lowest child mortality and highest life expectancy and self-reported life satisfaction. Across the vast majority of the world, the governing and cultural conditions that foster prosperity grew in the vast majority of countries. Science and technology diffused across countries and cultures, global collaboration, communication, capitalism and trade were increasingly accepted and employed, and where they spread, nearly every measure of living standard improved significantly.
Countries whose people opened their culture and economies to international trade, of goods, knowledge and innovation, became dramatically wealthier and healthier. From China to the former Soviet states, and from the contrast between North and South Korea, the correlation of embracing freedom, openness, capitalism and the Enlightenment, and prosperity is unquestionable.
Western culture and political governance are slowly turning away from the social, political and economic concepts, first fostered during the Enlightenment, and which have driven the liberty, innovation and trade that have improved living standards and made the West prosperous, powerful and secure.
The governments of the West are once again turning inward, toward nationalism, mercantilism, protectionism and authoritarianism. Under the guise of making America great again, defending us from adversaries, foreign and domestic, political reform or restoring balance in trade — the very conditions of free trade and markets, freedom of speech and the press, equality before the law, and the foundations of liberty and the right to the pursuit of happiness are being eroded.
“Left unchecked, a return to pre-Enlightenment culture, economics, law and government will render the average American with less freedom and prosperity, and with a life more akin to the past, than the future of flourishing many aspire to.”
While authoritarianism can be toppled overnight, its inception is often slow, insidious and little resisted; a gradual tightening of social and economic liberty, until near-total control is achieved. The culture of the West risks being metaphorically boiled alive by government and cultural reform in pursuit of a return to the ‘good old days’ before the freedoms and openness that made the world rich, and fueled the innovation that built the modern flourishing of the culture, economy and political norms of democratic representative government we take for granted today.
Left unchecked, a return to pre-Enlightenment culture, economics, law and government will render the average American with less freedom and prosperity, and with a life more akin to the past, than the future of flourishing many aspire to.
The solution is to embrace leaders and policies that turn outward, not inward; and that embrace freedom, not control. To embrace and encourage international collaboration and trade, and the diffusion of culture and innovation, while maximizing the liberty required to drive economic growth and build a better future for everyone.
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