2025-10-22 Open Society Progress, the Enlightenment, Aspirations, and the Open Society
Duration: 00:35:29
Transcript
Open Society interviewer
David Deutsch, thanks for doing this.
David Deutsch
Thanks for inviting me.
Open Society interviewer
Cool. So what do you think about humans that enables us to make progress like we have done, unlike any other animals?
David Deutsch
Of course, at the most hardware level, or even software level, it’s not really known what gives us the ability. What the ability is, I believe, is known. It’s the ability to solve problems by forming new explanatory ideas. And by explanatory, I mean a claim that some problem is as it is, or some feature of the world as it is, as we see it, as we perceive it, because of some unseen cause, which might be a law of nature, or it might be a factual misconception, like whether the sun goes around the earth or vice versa, or that kind of thing, or whether slavery is right or wrong. So that includes moral things as well, like that. What ties them all together? The ability that ties them all together is, you could call it creativity or explanatory creativity, shall we say.
Open Society interviewer
Right. On one side, we have the capabilities which some of the animals at least don’t have. And then that was not enough. We had to have something like the Enlightenment. And you have spoken about this in The Beginning of Infinity. Can you tell us a bit more about what you mean by Enlightenment?
David Deutsch
Because that word has been used in many different ways. So explanatory creativity, in my view, did not evolve to do what we now want it to do, or what we now think of it as doing. It evolved for the purpose of transmitting culture. And the main thing about transmitting culture during our evolutionary history and before things like the invention of writing, the main thing about it was to preserve the culture intact, not to lose any knowledge. And therefore, creativity was directed towards faithful preservation of the culture. And that was the real content, in my view, of most cultures, most societies, most families, most cooperative behavior of human beings. For most of our history, prehistoric history and then later historic history, for most of our history, that was the preoccupation of our culture. Not necessarily of people, because people didn’t know about all that for most of that time. They didn’t know they had a history. They didn’t know they were a species. They didn’t know they had a culture. They didn’t know they had evolved, and so on. So all these things were a product of dumb evolution. First of the capacity to do these things, of explanatory creativity, and then of the evolution, the cultural evolution of the means themselves, which had the same type of evolutionary pressure on them to maintain faithful preservation across generations. The Enlightenment was a rebellion against that. It was a rebellion, therefore, against authority. And even then, that’s not enough, because most rebellions against authority have just led to a different authority. So I think something, a particular thing characterized the thing I call the Enlightenment. And I think there may well have been many Enlightenments before that, which all ended badly. Our one has been the only one so far, which has lasted for more than a few hundred years. Most of them were extinguished within a generation or two. What characterizes those is what I call the search for good explanations. That is for ideas which, really that’s saying the search for actual explanations, rather than fake explanations. For explanations which couldn’t explain just anything, explanations which made sense, which didn’t become circular or invoke things by fiat. And that, for various reasons, which I think aren’t very well understood, the one that arose in Renaissance Italy and then spread to Northern Europe, to especially the Netherlands and to England and Scotland, that one seems to have staying power.
Open Society interviewer
Right. And like you said, there have been many Enlightenments and some of them have perished. So in order for continuous progress, we probably need certain institutions. And that kind of like preserves the Enlightenment ideas and propagates it more. A lot of the West had to do with adopting a lot of these Enlightenment ideas to be prosperous. And how do you think the West is prosperous compared to any other part of the world? Do you see any overlap in connection there?
David Deutsch
Yes, well, the West, which I take to be just not a geographical term, it’s a term just signifying societies and cultures which have taken up the ideas of the Enlightenment. The reason why they are prosperous in every sense, not just in terms of material progress, but in terms of moral progress and political progress, reducing internal wars within the countries of the Enlightenment. All those things have got better and better on the large scale. People can be cynical about the short term scale, but if you look on a scale, longer than half a lifetime, and so you can see that it is still improving. The West is still improving. So I’ve forgotten what your question was about the West. Yeah, but what about the West made it so prosperous? Well, very simply, it was simply that it adopted the quest for good explanations across the whole spectrum of human activities, the whole gamut, whatever you call it, of human activities. Previous Enlightenment, say the Athenian Enlightenment, it still had slavery and it didn’t have a conception of human rights and it still had aristocracy ruling the rest. The Enlightenment of Florence in the Renaissance had, again, artistic but not political. The ancient Athens and Greece in general did not have science as we know it. There were individuals who were interested in what we would call science, but there was no tradition of criticism as an institution as we have it in the West. Florence did invent some institutions of capitalism like banking and what’s it called? I’ve forgotten what the term is in banking where you have banks crediting each other. But anyway, they invented that, but the Athenians did nothing like that. They didn’t have capitalism as we know it, although they did have ownership, they did have rights for citizens who were only a small minority. So the West seems to have taken up all of those things due to a rather strange, unusual set of circumstances probably beginning in the Dutch Golden Age where for various reasons, pragmatic reasons, they had to have religious toleration. That was a pragmatic solution to a problem that would otherwise have torn them apart. And they had to have capitalism, they had to have science for similar pragmatic reasons. And it was for this sort of reason that they were able to keep their independence or repeatedly regain their independence from the superpowers of the day, Spain and France. So maybe it was just chance. I don’t believe what’s usually called the Whig interpretation of history that this was inevitable. By the way, the person who’s most accused of this is Macaulay who I think was the least guilty of it. He continually stresses in his History of England that many of the things that happened were darn lucky. They need not have happened the way they did and it just turned out well for progress. And I think the whole of our enlightenment may have arisen for contingent reasons that need not have been so. And then the whole thing was strengthened.
David Deutsch
Once it got hold of the institutions of society, it strengthened itself so that by now it’s very difficult to imagine how it could deteriorate. But if you think of the woke march through the institutions, you begin to get an inkling of how it might collapse this time.
Open Society interviewer
Right. I guess we see some signs of people being jailed for posting on X. And these are some things which is like the tradition of criticism is not accepted really well. And you can see some places where this is not implemented really. But do you see any areas in society today where the enlightenment or the tradition of criticism is not being adopted really well?
David Deutsch
Yeah. So first let me say these blemishes in the enlightenment in the present day are not really any greater or maybe smaller than they have always been. I mean the blasphemy laws were abolished quite recently in historical times and certainly well after the beginning of the enlightenment. And the freedom of speech similarly was not always implemented in the way that say present day libertarians would approve of. So we have many vestiges of pre-enlightenment institutions. It’s not a question of our institutions being taken over or decaying. And so there are vestiges. And I think the worst institutions in our society, well first are educational institutions, schools, universities, the general treatment of children and the general treatment of knowledge and knowledge transmission in our society. I suppose nowadays it’s doubly bad. First of all it really hasn’t shaken off the underlying assumptions about knowledge that were present pre-enlightenment, i.e. that the purpose of education and more generally its institutions is to transmit knowledge faithfully, to pour knowledge like a fluid into the bucket that is the young receptive mind as Popper put it. So we still have the vestiges of the, or more than vestiges, the underlying assumptions of the old attitudes. But we also have now what is called woke or perhaps we shouldn’t, perhaps we shouldn’t defer to their repeated changes of name for themselves. This is really the philosophy of postmodernism or Wittgensteinism or logical positivism generally applied. So now I’ve helped it to keep changing its name. But the thing which is now called woke is really all those things. They were all the same thing. They were all a principled rebellion against the foundation of the enlightenment. So denying that there is such a thing as objective truth, denying that there’s such a thing as objective morality and going back to ancient authoritarian conceptions of what knowledge should be, what society should be, even race realism is that that’s a feature of the woke right as some people call it today. But it’s really just the same thing that they are all the same rebellion. And when they encounter each other, they recognize that they are on the same side.
Open Society interviewer
Right. I think you made this case for moral relativism as well. Like even acknowledging that some societies are better than others or some cultures are better than others is a problem. But that is a problem also because that also means you cannot make progress because there is no such thing as a better society. Postmodernism has led to not accepting the truth. Like it’s almost an attack towards the truth itself.
David Deutsch
I agree. And I also agree that this feature of it being in radical opposition to progress because aspiring to progress means aspiring to a better society. And if there can be no such thing as a better society, then at best we can have a utopian conception of what we will change to once and for all and have then a single conception of morality and politics and truth.
Open Society interviewer
Yeah. And talking about this enlightenment and Western society, who are these enemies, as Popper called them, enemies of open society? What ideologies should we be aware of or like be careful about in society so that we don’t allow things that don’t allow criticism itself?
David Deutsch
So the philosophy, the political and moral philosophy that is that characterizes the enlightenment is often called liberalism or classical liberalism. Although in the United States and increasingly everywhere else, the very word liberal has been subverted to mean much the opposite, to mean a monoculture and also progressive, which has been subverted to mean a monoculture of not making progress. So everything except classical liberalism is the enemy of the open society or anything except Popperian liberalism is the enemy of the open society. But that’s not to say that Popperian liberalism is the enlightenment or is the final truth about morality or politics or anything like that. In fact, Popper himself improved it. So he wasn’t against improving liberalism. And I don’t think we should be afraid of criticizing and improving it, because that’s really the only thing that can defend it against its enemies indefinitely. So it will have to change and the only sustainable attribute of a society is progress. So I don’t think any named political movement can be characterized as the one, but the enemies of the open society can be viewed uniformly as having that attribute of being an enemy and it does make them into allies uncomfortably often.
Open Society interviewer
Right. I think even among the rational people, when we say something like we need rapid exponential progress, there is suddenly a concern about destruction and existential crisis. Should we not have sustained progress? There is a hesitation the moment there is a rapid exponential progress. Why do you think this is and that somehow influences people to be careful and implement laws which actually in fact prevent progress?
David Deutsch
Yes. Well, I think the philosophy that you might call environmentalism or something, which began to be influential in say the 1970s or so, it is another one of these rebellions against the enlightenment and its mantra or its fundamental critique of the enlightenment is of the form which has been tried with every other attack on the enlightenment as well. They all come to this trope of saying the thing you’re trying to do to improve things is the very thing that makes things worse. That’s what’s behind the environmentalist opposition to new technology and to wealth creation and to progress in the economy and so on. And similarly, what triggers people, if you use the modern terminology, is defending the enlightenment. That is being willing to use force as Popper says in defense of toleration. So intolerance is the one thing that can’t be tolerated consistently because intolerance, allowing intolerance into institutions destroys their ability to promote criticism and to promote toleration. So they all use this trope of the very thing you’re trying to defend goodness with is the very thing that causes badness. So imperialism for example and militarism and nationalism is an interesting one because it refers to two opposite things. It often happens in epistemology related things that a term first of all becomes co-opted by the enemies of the enlightenment and then the term is used for both things and then finally it turns into the opposite of what it originally meant. So Popper says somewhere that the nationalism is one of the great evils of modern philosophy and something like that and then he says even such a great man as Jan Masaryk, the hero of modern Czechoslovakia as it was then fell for this nationalism. But the nationalism of Jan Masaryk was not the one that Popper opposed. He himself defined the difference between the bad and good nationalism by saying that nationalism, the bad one that he wanted to oppose was the idea that nations as such have rights over individuals. But really the word is also often used in the reverse sense that belonging to a nation is one of the things that preserves institutions of criticism. So nations can have in their culture a tradition of criticism which loyalty to which can be misconstrued as sort of blind patriotism, but it isn’t. It can be principled endorsement of those particular values, not that because they are values of a particular country or society or the West or whatever, but because for independent reasons one can conclude that they are good values.
Open Society interviewer
Right. I suppose there is nothing wrong with society that actually supports a tradition of criticism to be proud of that country and what it has done for people and lifting people out of poverty. I don’t think Popper was talking about nationalism in that sense, right?
David Deutsch
Absolutely not. No, no, he’s not. But I think that even he, you know, when he says that that poor old Jan Masaryk fell for this bad philosophy, I think he didn’t. It’s Popper who has fallen for the conflation of two opposite ideas under the same name. For the similar reason he opposed Zionism and the founders of Zionism were themselves guilty of this. They didn’t make a distinction between a Zionism that is trying to solve a problem and to create and preserve institutions of consent and criticism in a country and for it to be a country that was part of the solution of the problem and the opposite, which was a kind of chauvinism to say that every nation deserves a country and that that country deserves the services of the people who it designates as members of itself.
Open Society interviewer
Right. And I also want to talk to you about aspirations. At least for me personally, it feels like the aspirations of people have gone down over time. This could be because of economic reasons or political reasons. I remember when I was in primary school, everybody wanted to become an astronomer and wanted to go to space. I feel that is not the case anymore. I mean, it might be with other things, but even the idea of we should go colonize Mars, we should take over the galaxy and these big ideas, we don’t aspire anymore or it seems to have gone down. Do you feel the same way or do you see any reasons for that?
David Deutsch
Absolutely. And I think the reason for it is that the idea of aspiration either for an individual or for society is intimately inextricable from the notion of progress. So we’re back to progress. Once you say that there’s no such thing as progress, there’s no such thing as a distinction between one state of being and another state of being, then you can’t aspire to anything. And that idea that you can’t and shouldn’t aspire to and aspiring to something is therefore arrogant and counterproductive and morally bad. Just calling things morally good or bad is itself morally bad, but except in this case, of course, postmodernists don’t necessarily respond to the criticism of being inconsistent, logically inconsistent. So because that is just a value and one can have a different value. So unfortunately, as I said, the education, the institutions of education are among the worst affected by both the old memes and the new bad memes. And as a result, children are being told that they are doomed, being inculcated with aversion to progress related concepts, including aspiring to anything.
Open Society interviewer
Yeah, and I think a lot of this is also coming from parents themselves, when children aspire, parents are saying, why don’t you be more realistic, or society or the teacher?
David Deutsch
Yes, I think that that has always existed that that’s part of the old bad memes, not the new bad memes.
Open Society interviewer
And also we have hate towards people who are aspiring big, like when we see entrepreneurs who are doing amazing things, somehow as a society, we have figured out a way to hate them and not credit them for their work.
David Deutsch
Yes, again, so free market economists have told us that those people are the very people who are providing us with wealth, not as Marxism says, that they are the very people who are depriving us of wealth. So the fundamental mantra, perhaps that’s the wrong word, if I can use that word, of Marxism and of socialism ever since Marx, though not before, is they’re taking your stuff, they’re stealing your stuff, let’s take it back. So this is the exact opposite of what is actually happening. So what’s actually happening is that they, the factory owners, the entrepreneurs, the innovators, they are, and the ones who aspire to a better world, they are the ones that are maintaining progress and maintaining the current state of everything good. So denigrating that and identifying it as the bad thing is central to, well, not quite, it’s not quite central to all the aspects of the enemies of the enlightenment, but it’s central to the socialist and environmentalist facets of it.
Open Society interviewer
Got it. And finally, David, how do you personally remain optimistic? I know you have a principle of optimism in the book, but I mean in a psychological sense, how do you personally remain optimistic?
David Deutsch
So remaining optimistic in the sense of my book is not difficult because I think I’ve made an unanswerable argument that it is true, that the principle of optimism is actually true of the universe, of nature, of the world. Being optimistic in the other sense of like not expecting doom around the corner is partly that once you’re optimistic in the first sense, you see prophecies of doom in context as simply saying, like I first realized when I was 17 and went to this lecture by Paul Ehrlich, and I realized that all he was saying is that if we don’t solve these problems, we are doomed. And that’s always been true and that’s always going to be true, and therefore that’s no kind of prophecy, that’s nothing. It’s a truism. So we have solved those problems, those specific problems that he referred to, and we solved them much faster than he thought was possible and that the consensus thought was possible when they adopted his ideas. They still retain his ideas despite that, and then that allows me personally to look. Now I’m older, I can think, well, at the time when I was refusing to be taken in by Ehrlich’s lecture, what was the rest of the world like? You know, the rest of the world, so at that time gay sex was illegal, and that on the moral side and on the material side, going on holiday abroad was something only rich people could do. And all sorts of ideas and children were being beaten in school every day. That was just, you know, if somebody wanted a logo of the teachers, like if the teachers union was on strike or something, you saw they said on TV the teachers union was on strike and behind the announcer there was a picture denoting the teacher. The picture denoting the teacher had a cane in his hand. So economically, if there was a TV program about some issue, you know, like should divorce be made easier or should gay sex be allowed or, you know, any issue of the day, there was always on the panel there was a person from the left, a person from the right, and a trade unionist, and sometimes a bishop. So the idea that a trade unionist was involved in the decision-making fabric of the country, of society, of morality, that is no longer there. The bishop is also no longer there. The trade unionist and the bishop are called in to such things when the issue is about trade unionism or religion or whatever. So the whole of society has improved in those and many other ways beyond recognition. The very fact that we’re talking to each other through a computer, that was more or less inconceivable at the time when I was resisting that Ehrlich lecture. So in that way too, I can see things in perspective.
Open Society interviewer
Got it. David Deutsch, thanks for doing this.
David Deutsch
Yes, you’re very welcome. It’s been fun.
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