Freedom May Have a Speed Limit, but No Country Is Anywhere Near It

I have said in various places that cultures can change fast, and that the claim that a given people is not ready for freedom is usually a claim made by whoever is currently denying it to them. I still think that. But I want to give the opposing view its due, because it has a real case, and then explain why, even if it is right, it changes nothing about what we should do.

The Question

How fast can a society raise its level of freedom?

Everyone agrees the rate varies. It depends on the strength of religious institutions, on the level of education, on how exposed the population is to outside communication, on whether there is a war next door, on the state of the economy, and on much else. A society with a literate population and an open press moves differently from one with neither.

Everyone also agrees that some societies have moved very fast. Japan and Germany went from militarised autocracy to functioning liberal states in the span of a decade, under occupation, with populations that had been told for years that liberalism was decadence. Whatever a theoretical speed limit might be, those two cases show it is not low.

So there is no ceiling built into human nature. The question is whether there is a ceiling built into particular circumstances.

The Case for a Limit

Here is the view I want to take seriously.

A specific country, in a specific set of conditions, may have a much lower limit than the theoretical one. Push past it and you do not get faster progress; you get regression. The reforms outrun the institutions that would sustain them, the population experiences change as chaos, and the reaction that follows leaves the country less free than before the push began.

The historical record supplies cases. Reforms imposed from above on populations that had no part in them have collapsed into something worse more than once. Revolutions that declared freedom on a Tuesday have produced terror by the following spring. A society whose only experience of authority is arbitrary may read the removal of authority as the arrival of a different arbitrariness.

I think there is a good case for this. Not a decisive one, but a real one, and it would be dishonest to wave it away because it is inconvenient for a position I hold.

Why the Argument Does Not Do What Its Users Want

Now notice how the speed-limit argument is actually deployed. It is almost never used to say: here is the limit, let us approach it. It is used to say: this people is not ready, so nothing should change.

That is a different claim, and it does not follow.

Grant the limit. Then ask, for any particular country, whether it is currently moving toward freedom at anything like that limit. The answer is almost always no. The rate of advance is not being held back by the danger of going too fast. It is being held back by the minority that holds power in that country, which has every reason to keep the rate at zero, and by minorities that hold power in other countries, which trade with the first minority and would rather it stayed put. Representative regimes are not exempt from this; they have propped up plenty of autocrats whose populations were, on any measure, ready for more than they were getting.

So the actual constraint on the rate is not the speed limit. It is the brakes, and someone has a foot on them.

The Two Views, and Why It Does Not Matter Which Is Right

Let me state the two positions cleanly.

One says culture does not matter: people everywhere want the same things, and a population can adopt free institutions as fast as those institutions can be built. The other says some cultures must go slowly: institutions have to grow, habits have to form, and forcing the pace causes regression.

I lean toward the first, with the German and Japanese cases in hand. But suppose the second is correct. Suppose every country has its own limit, and some of those limits are low.

We are still nowhere near them. Not one country I can think of is advancing toward freedom so fast that the danger of regression through excess speed is its main problem. The main problem, everywhere, is the interest of the people holding the current arrangement in place. Both theories, applied honestly to the world as it is, give the same instruction: speed up.

The Payoff of a Small Change in Rate

One more point, because it explains why this is worth arguing about at all.

Even a modest increase in the rate at which a society moves toward freedom pays enormously, because the costs of unfreedom are cumulative and the conflicts it breeds are the expensive kind. A country that gets to a given level of liberty ten years earlier has saved itself ten years of the resentment, the emigration, the wasted talent and the violence that the unfree years produce. Some of those conflicts, once started, do not stop when the reform finally arrives.

So the aim is not to hit the speed limit, whatever it is. The aim is to close the gap between the rate we are actually moving and the rate we could, and that gap is wide in every country I know of, including the ones that call themselves free.