As Matt Ridley put it in his book
“The Rational Optimist” (2010), what happened over the past two centuries is
that “ideas started having sex.” The idea of a railroad was a coupling of
high-pressure steam engines with cars running on coal-mining rails. The idea
for a lawn mower coupled a miniature gasoline engine with a miniature mechanical
reaper. And so on, through every imaginable sort of invention. The coupling of
ideas in the heads of the common people yielded an explosion of betterments.
Why did ideas so suddenly start
having sex, there and then? Why did it all start at first in Holland about 1600
and then England about 1700 and then the North American colonies and England’s
impoverished neighbor, Scotland, and then Belgium and northern France and the
Rhineland?
The answer, in a word, is
“liberty.” Liberated people, it turns out, are ingenious. Slaves, serfs,
subordinated women, people frozen in a hierarchy of lords or bureaucrats are
not. By certain accidents of European politics, having nothing to do with deep
European virtue, more and more Europeans were liberated. From Luther’s
reformation through the Dutch revolt against Spain after 1568 and England’s
turmoil in the Civil War of the 1640s, down to the American and French
revolutions, Europeans came to believe that common people should be liberated
to have a go. You might call it: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
How the West (and the rest) got rich
