In his lead essay, Michael Shermer usefully defines what he calls the Realistic Vision as one accepting that “human nature is relatively constrained by our biology and evolutionary history, and therefore social and political systems must be structured around these realities, accentuating the positive and attenuating the negative aspects of our natures.” Accentuating the positive and attenuating the negative aspects of our natures are exactly what liberalism (libertarianism) has done so brilliantly since its advent a little over two centuries ago at the edges of Europe.
The sweep of history clearly shows that the natural state of humanity is abject poverty. Very much in line with the views of Friedrich Hayek, the most brilliant economist of the twentieth century, I understand human evolution and history as a search through time in which thousands of societies and billions of people tested religious, political, family, and economic institutions.[1] Those slowly discovered institutions differentially helped some groups to out-reproduce and out-compete other groups. The institutions that helped groups that discovered and adopted them to succeed against other groups can be thought of as embodying an ever better understanding of our human natures.
Hayek also identified a specific problem with the development of science—its success tempts some people to believe that they now know enough to mold society after their hearts’ desires (and those desires are always in a collectivist direction). As Hayek pointed out in The Constitution of Liberty, “those intoxicated by the advance of knowledge so often become the enemies of freedom.”
As Hayek explained, “It is because freedom means the renunciation of direct control of individual efforts that a free society can make use of so much more knowledge than the mind of the wisest ruler could comprehend.”
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