None of us got where we are on our own. I don’t just mean the relatives, the friends, the social connections, the teachers, the professional colleagues, and so forth. I mean something even deeper than that. We got where we are because of the doctors who treat us when we’re sick, the sanitation engineers who keep us from imbibing our own – and other people’s – filth, the farmers who grow our food, the truck drivers who move our food to market, the pharmacologists who create the medications that keep people with previously fatal chronic illnesses alive. The medical school professors who taught the doctors who helped deliver us earn some of the credit too. It’s the famous “I, Pencil” essay, but for people. No matter how smart you are, and no matter how hard you work, you can harvest the fruits of your labors because others have harvested theirs. What we have and who we are derives from the triumphs and failures of countless others.
Societies work the same way too. No society, polity, or culture springs forth fully-formed from Jupiter’s brow. It emerges from whatever came before it, and whatever successes and defeats that included. This bears remembering because we find it all too easy to talk about real societies like they are purely hypothetical and infinitely malleable. History is just this inconvenient thing that happens to be there, and not part of the fabric of that forms the present. Whatever situation you happen to find yourself in at the present inherited a great deal from whatever came before.
Our minds, oriented rationally enough towards affairs of the present, don’t always take this into account in contemplating how to reform or change society. It’s fine to say that the regulatory environment we now live in is too burdensome, and that governments are too overweening in comparison to what they actually accomplish. You can even say that markets provide services and allocate resources more efficiently than planners do, and I’d probably agree with you. But to look and the world, as some libertarians do, and imagine a world without states or real governments, is a privatized bridge too far.
Yes, governments do stupid things, and yes examples of market-inspired innovation abound. But the historical reality is that markets and states have shaped each other and grown up alongside each other. Markets benefit from the stability offered by states, and states benefit from the increased income and prosperity provided by markets. Mancur Olson was on to something. You can imagine, if you like, a world without states, but it will have to stay in your imagination. You have to consider that the world you live in came into being through the interactions of the things you don’t like with the things you do. Don’t throw the economic baby out with the statist bathwater. Just because you don’t like the state, you have to contend its history, and with the reality that you live in a world greatly influenced by it. One of the commonalities between libertarians and Marxists, incidentally, is a view of the future disconnected from actual historical reality, though Marxists at least have the decency to even have a theory of history in the first place even if it’s bad and wrong.
You can say much the same about religion. Those of us unfortunate enough to remember the fashionable “New Atheism” of the ’00s are familiar enough with its terms and premises. You can articulate the case that religion has been a net negative influence on human civilization – which I would of course dispute – but you can’t treat it like it could never have existed. That just isn’t the world we live in. Like it or not, we live in a world profoundly shaped by the contours of religious thinking, and any program for organizing a society has to account for that. Even the Jacobins and the Bolsheviks could not reset human affairs to Year 0, much as they tried. People have a history whether they know it or not, and that history molds their thoughts and actions.
As William Faulkner once put it, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” The present did not just pop into being. Someone had to put it there. The example of the past does not compel us to follow it to the letter: that would be a mistake. But we would be ill-advised, similarly, to act as though it did not exist at all. The future, in some sense, is ours to mold as we see fit. But we can only do so by incorporating raw materials from our forebears. You stand on the shoulders of giants. Just make sure you know how you got there before you decide to jump off.