Ages are no more infallible than individuals; every age having held many opinions which subsequent ages have deemed not only false but absurd; and it is as certain that many opinions, now general, will be rejected by future ages, as it is that many, once general, are rejected by the present.
-John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
By liberty I mean the assurance that every man shall be protected in doing what he believes his duty against the influence of authority and majorities, custom and opinion.
-Lord Acton, The History of Freedom in Antiquity
The ‘open society’ is a term much used, but tragically little understood. Like too many terms within political philosophy, it is simply used in an emotivistic fashion to signify the author’s approval of something. Originating with Henri Bergson’s writing in the 1930s, the term was make famous by Karl Popper’s two volume project, The Open Society and Its Enemies. The books were a sustained attack on both the political ideas of Plato as well as the historicism of Hegel and Marx, and a powerful argument for the advantages of liberal democracy. The ‘open society’ has thereafter become a banner for liberals and social democrats, but its widespread use has not been beneficial for its clear meaning as a term in conversation. Which leads to the question: What exactly is the ‘open society’?
Even though Popper ( a founding member of the Mont Pelerin Society) certainly had a favorable opinion of liberal democracy, we must remember that Karl Popper’s concept of an ‘open society’ was epistemological, not political. It is very easy to simply identify the open society with a certain political regime in which democracy flourishes, and people have certain guaranteed rights, but Popper’s point did not have anything directly to do with either of those two points. The open society is a society in which people can make their own opinions about norms and policies, and can act upon those opinions. When Popper quoted Pericles as being a proponent of the open society when he quotes him as saying: “Although only a few may originate a policy, we are all able to judge it”, Popper was noting that Pericles’ notion of Athenian democracy enabled the Athenian to make his own decisions about political decision making, and that was the essential condition making Athens an open society.
What differentiated an open society from a closed society is thereby that, within the open society, individuals would be able to make decisions to change cultural norms. Closed societies, on the other hand, are found in a lack of a distinction between the conventional laws of human society, and the physical laws of the universe. They are constituted by taboos, norms thought to be permanent features of the world just like gravity or the movement of the stars and moon above. Thought to be the creation of gods, of forces of history, or of demigod-like leaders, and the rigidity of these taboos ensures that the society is closed to change. Popper even argued that the existence of taboos within closed societies resulted in people within those societies not being faced with decisions that could be called moral:
There are few problems in this form of life, and nothing equivalent to moral problems. I do not mean to say that a member of a tribe does not sometimes need much heroism and endurance in order to act in accordance with the taboos. What I mean is that he will rarely find himself in the position of doubting how he ought to act. The right way is always determined, though difficulties must be overcome in following it. It is determined by taboos, by magical tribal institutions which can never become objects of critical consideration (Popper 1945, 172).
Kierkegaard’s assertion that philosophy begins with doubt is quite germane here. Popper writes on what differentiates the open society from that of taboos:
Political decisions may lead to the alteration of taboos, and even of political laws which are no longer taboos. The great difference is the possibility of rational reflection of these matters… And in our own time, many of us make rational decisions concerning the desirability or otherwise of new legislation, and of other institutional changes; that is to say, decisions based upon an estimate of possible consequences, and upon a conscious preference for some of them. We recognize rational personal responsibility.
In what follows, the magical or tribal or collectivist society will also be called the closed society, and the society in which individuals are confronted with personal decisions, the open society (Ibid, 173).
The open society comes to fruition when people can philosophize, in however a crude fashion, and come to make decisions which can have impact upon the conventions of society. Unlike the closed society, the open society can be changed by the opinions of those within it.
What defines the open society is therefore an answer to a question which Darwin never broached in On the Origin of Species: What types of systems can evolve? It’s important here to note that Charles Darwin never used the word ‘evolution.’ Instead, he used the phrase ‘descent with modification.’ At the beginning of the final chapter of On the Origin of Species, Darwin described his argument as being “the theory of descent with modification; through variation and Natural Selection.” Questions of evolution are best thought of in terms of ‘descent with modification’ because the term constantly reminds us what we should be thinking about when we think about evolution: The mutability of objects across time because of some source of variation.
‘Evolution’ is a term used so often and so widely that it loses its ability to really address what we are thinking about when we talk about what it addresses. From being used to refer to the ”theory of descent with modification; through variation and Natural Selection” (e.g. “We should teach evolution, not creationism in schools”) to the notion that certain types of systems in the world which can adapt to change through time (e.g. “Societies evolve throughout history”), ‘evolution’ does little good to exactly specify what we are trying to talk about when we it. ‘Descent with modification’, on the other hand, focuses our attention on what matters: that there are certain systems which can change through succeeding iterations.
The closed society is a closed system with no source of change which can introduce variation into it. The way that societies change is with alterations to norms and institutions. If those norms and institutions are taboos, assumed as permanent features of the world and thereby insulated from criticism, then that society does not have a effective way of adapting to the changing demands of its populations. Within the closed society, there is therefore an identity between the taboos of the present generation with that of the previous generation. However, when people are left to make their own judgments of the desirability of norms and institutions, then there is a source of variation which can then change the society. With a variation in judgements about the desirability of norms and institutions, society can change over time, and descent with variation - that is, evolution - is therefore possible.
The open society is the a society which enables the accumulation of useful social variation which can encourage the flourishing of those within it. What a ‘useful’ variation is must be kept empty here. To think that the human mind can define what social variation is useful from the point of view of society as a whole is to fall victim of the fatal conceit. There is a knowledge problem in recognizing the useful from the harmful since only those who are familiar with the variation in question will by and large have any chance in properly making that call. Even then, many may still make mistakes. And so there must be feedback mechanisms in place whose soundness can be relied upon with no reference to the specific people involved with them. The project of the open society is thus, in short, about figuring out the legal institutions, the formal rules of the game for society at large, which enable the accumulation of useful social variation.
That Popper harshly criticized the idea of national destiny within The Open Society and Its Enemies fits with all that I have said above. Societies do not follow predetermined courses through history, and the traits that they have at any moment in time cannot be attributed to destiny. Instead, those traits are a consequence of a historically continent series of events, and unique outcomes which resulted in certain variations manifesting themselves within society at large. The open society is simply no guarantee of optimal outcomes. Speaking technically, evolution can get stuck within local maxima within its fitness landscape, and those local maxima can prevent its fitness walk from finding the global maximum; evolution, does not necessarily yield the optimal outcome. Instead, all that the open society can guarantee us is a fighting chance for that optimal outcome.
Those institutions and habits which we identify with the optimal outcome cannot simply be assumed as an outcome of history - along the great forward march of progress - but must be understood as perishable. I thus like to modify the term ‘open society’ with the adjective ‘free’ to identify that society, one protecting the dignity of the individual human person’s free will, as the optimal outcome. Not only is it open, but it is also free; to get there, we must not only insist on having an open society, a society which can accumulate useful variation, but also a society which conforms to classically liberal notions of political ethics.
Bibliography
Popper, Karl. The Open Society and Its Enemies Vol. I. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966.
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