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Zusammenfassung von Open

Name: Open
Rating: 4.5 (65 reviews)
Author: Johan Norberg

Johan Norberg

The Story of Human Progress

4.5 (65 Bewertungen)

22 Min.

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What’s in it for me? From ancient history to modern times, discover the real reason behind human progress.

Around 300,000 years ago, humans began to trade with one another. The benefits of trade have been well understood ever since. We’re better off together than alone. According to the author, free, unregulated trade between nations is the keystone of humanity’s present prosperity. The same is true of free trade in the distant past – it allowed people who didn’t have water to get water, and those who didn’t have bread to get bread.

Eventually though, problems can arise that interrupt the flow of free trade. A plague comes along, or a foreign army invades. Such events can cause people to panic and for fear to take control. But when this happens, suffering only increases. Innovation stagnates, the economy collapses, and poverty rears its ugly head. History tells us that we need openness to flourish. So it’s time to learn from our mistakes and make sure we don’t give in to fear.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

why the Neanderthals died off;
what happened during the Great Vanishing; and
why China’s recent economic boom is unlikely to last.

Cooperation is key to human progress.

There are three things that set human beings apart from other lifeforms on the planet: intelligence, language, and cooperation. This third trait was key to our evolution. Dating back about 3.2 million years ago, the Australopithecus afarensis species was a crucial evolutionary link between humans and our chimpanzee-like ancestors.

Due to dramatic environmental changes that turned rainforests into savannahs, our ancestors were forced to fend for themselves on dry ground. As a result, Australopithecus afarensis developed unique changes to its hand, wrist, shoulder, and upper arm. The reason? To enable it to throw stones.

Our early ancestors needed to cooperate in order to survive. And once they figured out that coordinated stone-throwing could take down animals far bigger and stronger than they were, there was no turning back. We were on our way to becoming human.

The key message here is: Cooperation is key to human progress.

Psychologist William von Hippel calls the advent of coordinated stone-throwing our “social leap.” Cooperation and the transfer of knowledge and skills among people would continue to be at the heart of human advancement.

Fast forward to around 45,000 years ago. In western Eurasia, the author believes that there was enough of a population build-up that ideas began to merge – and advanced tool-making began to take place. He adds that the knowledge of how to make these tools then spread to Africa and the Middle East, where they were further developed.

In fact, we can see how this spreading of ideas and social openness were deciding factors in human evolution. Around 50,000 years ago is also when the Neanderthals began to die off – or, to put it more accurately, the Neanderthals’ way of life died off, while the lineage of Neanderthals mixed with Homo sapiens.

One of the reasons for this was that Homo sapiens traveled and traded, while Neanderthals tended to stay close to home in their chilly Northern European climate. Through their travels and trading, Homo sapiens found value in the division of labor. This means that those who were great at hunting hunted, and those who were skilled at making clothes did just that. Societies began forming, and new levels of prosperity were achieved.

Neanderthals, on the other hand, never flourished like their more open-minded Homo sapiens relatives. Despite having larger brains, their preference for staying put meant they didn’t start dividing up their labor.

The first globalists revealed the enduring benefits of free trade and an open society.

Why did people build cities? One theory is that cities were built to provide security, but the reality is closer to the other way around. Through cooperation, division of labor, and the building of cities, people generated so much wealth that they had to start building walls in order to protect that wealth.

Recent studies show that the bigger the city, the more productive and innovative it is. And we can thank the early Mesopotamian cities for the first advances in a variety of fields such as chemistry, medicine, mathematics, zoology, and mapmaking. With division of labor and efficient farming, people were finally free to devote time to their speciality – and the rest of the city could reap the benefits.

Throughout history, enlightenment was happening outside a close-minded Europe.

Earlier in his life, the author believed that there was something unique about Europe – something that destined it to become the birthplace of modern civilization and the Age of Enlightenment. But the more he learned about the histories of other regions of the world, the more he realized that this was not the case. In fact, he discovered that there were a lot of places where modernity could’ve taken hold before seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe.

Many places the world over have followed a similar pattern. First, a time of openness and prosperity occurs, followed by something bad, like the appearance of an invading army. This gets blamed on the spirit of openness, and so society closes up and enters a dark period. This lasts until enough people call for a return to the freedom and well-being that came with open borders, trade, and tolerance.

In Europe, openness took hold as new trade possibilities emerged.

An important discovery was made in 1085, when parts of northern Spain were conquered by Christian Europeans. In the city of Toledo, a Muslim library was found that contained translated intellectual and scientific works, including what was left of Aristotle’s work.

This conquered area of Spain became a beacon for intellectual Europeans, who were starving after years of being cut off from knowledge. As the historian David Levering Lewis puts it, “Muslim learning, having seeped into the Christian West for decades from Andalusia, commenced a torrential outflow.” Over the next two centuries, a gradual opening up of Europe took place. By 1500, this opening up began to overflow beyond Europe’s borders.

The global economy is not a zero-sum game.

In 1707, with the union of England and Scotland, Great Britain came into being. And not long afterward, the United States of America was born when the new country split from Great Britain. Just as England gained a great deal of technology from Scotland, not the least of which was the steam engine, the US quickly became a hotbed of innovation. This was in part through its founding principle of being a nation open to immigrants, who were free to practice their religion of choice – and pursue their own ideas.

This, of course, was a founding principle that would be tested by the fact that the US also started out as a slave-owning nation, and one where certain immigrants wouldn’t always be so welcome. But these principles are nevertheless at the root of American success. The same can be said of the policy of free trade.

In many ways, human instincts are in conflict with openness.

So far, the cycle of opening and closing trade hasn’t hit Europe, the US, Japan, and the other countries that have benefited from free trade in the past two centuries. But that doesn’t mean it can’t happen.

For the most part, the benefits have been undeniable and plentiful. Since the early 1800s, the average worldwide life expectancy has risen from under thirty years to over seventy. Over the same time period, poverty has dropped from afflicting 90 percent of the world’s population to only around nine percent. Openness has rid the world of many diseases, and has led to countless medical and scientific discoveries. But since we are human beings, we also have a fear of openness, otherness, and uncertainty. And since the events of 9/11 and the economic crisis of 2008, those fears have only grown.

Authoritarianism is also rooted in human impulse – but it doesn’t help.

It’s no coincidence that governments tend to grow in times of uncertainty and fear. This is another human instinct – to look to the strongman for protection when things get dire. For the most part, the author notes that since WWII, people everywhere have become more liberal than the previous generation. There have been more calls for equal rights and autonomy from the state. But that doesn’t mean we’re free from our authoritarian impulses.

As the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt puts it, when the right button gets pushed, people can become “focused on defending their in-group, [and] kicking out foreigners . . . . At those times, they are more attracted to strongmen and the use of force.” This isn’t an impulse we left behind after WWII; it’s one that we’ll have to contend with now and forever.

The problems facing the world today can only be solved through openness.

There’s an old saying among communist workers: “We pretend to work, they pretend to pay us.” But these days, China is something of an anomaly, existing somewhere on the border between authoritarian rule and free market entrepreneurship. And despite what the party narrative may be, that wasn’t planned by the government.

The fact is that farmers in the 1990s began operating as private businesses of their own accord, and the trend quickly caught on – to the point where the government had little choice but to sanction it. So China opened up, ever so slightly, with “economic free zones” being created and foreign advisors being quietly brought in. As a result, the economy blossomed. But can government-sanctioned capitalism last?

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Worum geht es in Open?

Open (2020) traces the progress of ancient and modern human accomplishments, and reveals that behind all of our major advancements is a policy of openness, tolerance, and free trade. You’ll see how, from the Phoenicians to the Dutch East India Trading Company, the free flow of commerce and ideas has led to wealth, innovation, and problem-solving that would have never been possible otherwise.

Bestes Zitat aus Open

China would only return to the world scene when its economy was once again opened up to the world in the late twentieth century.…

—Johan Norberg

Wer Open lesen sollte

History buffs
Those interested in the Brexit debate
People keen to know the secrets of innovation and progress

Über den Autor

Johan Norberg is a best-selling Swedish author and lecturer, and a senior fellow at Washington D.C.’s Cato Institute. He is also a regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal and HuffPost. His books include Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future (2016), which was named the Economist’s book of the year.

Kategorien mit Open

Psychologie Geschichte Gesellschaft & Kultur

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