An Open Society, If You Can Keep It

The liberal ideal is that we ought always to be striving for an open society; a society that is “open to ideas,” “open to people,” and “open to change.” In an open society, if you hate your boss or your job, you can quit. If you hate where you live, you can move somewhere else. Artists do not need to fear offending either the church or the party. Citizens can criticize or even insult political leaders without fearing reprisal. Subcommunities can experiment with different lifestyles freely. Difference is allowed, and dynamism is the rule rather than the exception. It isn’t always comfortable; change can be difficult even when it is clearly good, and most change is not an unmixed good. But there can be little doubt that an open society is the only kind that can truly grow, in the narrowly economic but also in the broader, moral sense. To resist change is either an exercise in futility or, worse, a recipe for stagnation. To dictate the minutiae of how we are to live is a suffocating tyranny.

An open society is an achievement for which there is no one path, no formula. Once achieved, however, it must be maintained. When maintenance falls behind, it must be renewed. In what follows, I will discuss the difficulties of keeping an open society once you have one, and some steps we can take today to keep our own.

The open society is not some utopian ideal, some romantic picture of pure self-expression. It is a concrete reality enabled entirely by the conditions of the modern world. The technological revolutions of the last two centuries have made it possible for individuals to enjoy an unparalleled freedom of action. Traveling from almost anywhere in the world to almost anywhere else in less than a day, or a couple of days at most, is an option available to billions of people. Instant communication without distance limitations is even more broadly available, and trivially easy to take advantage of. Media and art, both contemporary and historical, both local and foreign, are also extremely accessible to ordinary people. It has never been easier for ordinary people to start or join a church, club, or business, to enter politics, or otherwise make drastic changes to their own lives or potentially impact the lives of many others.

But people do not just want to be entertained, or productive, or creative. People also want to control other people. From the busybody who wants to control what colors their neighbors can paint their houses, to the insular religious community that collectively shuns nonconformists, the desire for social control is a fact of human nature.

And of course, it is not just neighbors and faith communities that exercise social control over one another, and shunning is hardly the sole mechanism by which social control is imposed. Today, the very conditions that have made possible a greatly expanded domain of individual freedom also make possible totalitarianism of a scale and extent that was previously unimaginable. Planes and trains can carry commercial passengers or they can carry bombs and infantry—indeed, the fastest transit speeds in the world are reached by fighter jets capable of traveling at several times the speed of sound. Communication technologies are also propaganda and surveillance technologies. Manufacturing complexes can produce computers and cars for private use, or they can be repurposed by fascists to produce missiles, tanks, bombs, guns. The promise of the open society coexists with the risk of the total society, or even total annihilation.

We have not yet managed total annihilation, but we have managed a few short-lived total societies. We have also managed no small number of quite open societies, but the world overall is neither very open nor especially totalitarian. Instead, the median contemporary society is more open and more mobile than the median society of even a century ago, but also very heavily weighed down with rigid restrictions, imposed from above as well as horizontally.

Social control per se is not the problem. You cannot have a society at all without it. The social conditions that make an open society possible all rely on social control; any mechanism for enforcing property rights are by definition methods of social control. If you don’t want private citizens committing assault against people expressing points of view they disagree with (or really, at all), you will need laws against assault enforced by what can be quite unpleasant mechanisms of social control. And even those procedures by which one arm of a government checks another are mechanisms of social control—a court declaring a law unconstitutional, for example.

The problem is when social control is turned specifically to the ends of choking off dynamism. Open societies are ever changing, and people are rarely comfortable with powerlessness in the face of change. The tremendous capacities afforded by the modern world are often turned against the very conditions that created them in the first place, as those who have benefitted from a dynamic and creative culture seek to freeze current arrangements in place.

We nevertheless do get open societies in the modern world, and they have by and large had greater longevity than their totalitarian opposites. The capabilities provided to modern individuals place a constant pressure on too-narrow restrictions, and the wealth and possibilities afforded by successful open societies is tempting for elites looking after their own interests and those of their social bases.

In America we like to think that our Constitution provides the foundation for the open society that we enjoy, but a 236-year-old bargain has little power to move society today. Instead, American elites have constantly had to come back to the table to strike bargains, some that were essential to maintaining an open society, others that narrowed the scope of it significantly. They did so with an eye to the very social bases that made them elites in the first place, who could just as easily revoke their status as elites if they found the bargains struck on their behalf to be wanting. And so it has gone, here and elsewhere; every generation coming back to the table to strike some fresh arrangement and update old ones.

Elites and social control

“Elites” is a term commonly bandied about without much analytical rigor. This seemingly aspirational status has, in political discourse at least, appeared to sink so low as to simply mean anyone with a college degree, or even anyone whose parents have college degrees. Given that the former alone makes up over 37% of the population, “elite” appears to be a not particularly exclusive category.

I will here use “elite” to refer to those individuals capable of mobilizing a significant degree of social control. “Social control” itself will be used according to the definition provided by the sociologist Donald Black, for whom it referred to “how people define and respond to deviant behavior.”

It thus includes punishment of every kind—such as the destruction or seizure of property, banishment, humiliation, beating, and execution—as well as a demand for compensation by an aggrieved person or group, an accusation or application of sorcery, gossip, scolding, or merely a facial expression of disapproval such as a scowl or stare. It also includes various modes of intervention by third parties, such as mediation, arbitration, and adjudication. In this sense, social control is present whenever and wherever people express grievances against their fellows.^[1]

Sociologists care about this, of course, not because the way that societies define or respond to deviant behavior is intrinsically interesting, but because even the act of defining it has an influence on the behaviors of people within those societies. And so mobilizing a significant amount of social control is a fairly concrete method of influencing the course of a society, and a potent tool in political negotiations. The leadership of an ethnic party in a plural society, for example, may be able to mobilize their ethnic group to protest, strike, or even riot, depending on the circumstances. The threat of such things makes it difficult for other elites to ignore them or their ethnic group when making policy or other choices.

Under this definition, elites come in many types. The leadership of political parties are included, as are the owners and CEOs of major corporations, media figures with large and loyal audiences, leaders of workers' unions, officers in the military, police chiefs, and the clergy of major religious organizations, to list just a few. The very dynamism of open societies in the modern world means that new categories of elites are created all the time. But while the categories may be numerous, the number of individuals as a percentage of the population is not.

One characteristic of an open society is that there is relatively more turnover in this class of person, and entry into it is relatively easier than other societies. As a result, the fraction of the population that can arguably be called elite is likely to be larger, if still quite small.

Competition for a seat at this table is always extremely fierce, and one of the key challenges any society faces is to arrive at an arrangement that avoids making outright violence a stable component of such competitions. Totalitarianism, thought in the 1930s to be the wave of the future, turned out to be quite fragile indeed as Stalin’s prototype of the form proved to be extremely lethal for even the deepest inner circle of political elites. Once Stalin himself was out of the way, the USSR immediately began loosening its grip on the population. This was not pursued out of a passion for liberty and pluralism, but out of a simple sense of self-preservation on the part of Soviet elites.

Elites of course have interests beyond simply avoiding violent death, and may seek to coordinate on conventions that serve those interests. A common strategy elites pursue is pure patronage; after all, one of the key interests of any elite is to secure the very foundation of being an elite in the first place, their social base they can mobilize if they need to. Simply buying this base off on an ongoing basis is an obvious solution.

Once in place, such conventions can be difficult to alter to any significant degree. Reforming a patronage system is always going to involve clear losers who are unlikely to quietly accept it.

Since 1787, written constitutions have become a common tool by which elites coordinate to make large-scale changes to their political and legal systems. But they are by no means necessary to do so. Even in the United States, when a significant number of elites soured on the arrangement, renegotiation did not occur through adopting a new constitution wholesale, but through the legislative process outlined in the existing constitution:

Consider the bargaining between northern and southern states in the U.S. constitutional convention. The sides disagreed over the most profound moral question of the day, yet came together in a compromise that clearly contemplated the continued existence of slavery. Both sides based their negotiating positions on the perceived likelihood that population expansion would proceed in the South and West. For southern states, the provision that no bill be passed banning slave importation until 1808 was seen as an acceptable compromise, given the expectations that the South would be in the majority by that time and the slave population would be self-sustaining. Even as the negotiations in Philadelphia were taking place, however, Congress passed the Northwest Ordinance, which led to great expansion in Ohio and other Western regions. By 1808, when Congress passed a bill banning the slave trade, the South's assumptions from 1787 appeared invalid and, yet, the South did not exit the Union (at least not immediately). Rather, it sought renegotiation in the series of pacts beginning with the Missouri Compromise, which embodied an unwritten constitutional commitment to bisectionalism. Had it not done so, the South's nullification may well have come earlier.^[2]

The American South is a good example of just how intractable a problem this can be. Compromise, renegotiation, and outright war and occupation were all employed, and yet while slavery was ultimately abolished by the last of these, the social system of the South stubbornly resisted any meaningful transformation beyond this.

Pressure from below

Writing about the growth of nationalism in the 19th and 20th centuries, Azar Gat argued:

[O]ne little noted reason why nationalism became so potent in modernity is that the masses—more mobile and largely concentrated in the cities, near the centers of power—were now far more able to voice and enforce their preferences, which were almost invariably nationalistic. Rulers had to be much more responsive to these wishes than they had been obligated to when the masses were impotently scattered in the countryside.^[3]

Indeed, even in relatively poor countries, modern individuals are more mobile, urban, and overall capable than their pre-modern equivalents. The margin of error for a pre-modern subsistence farmer was quite small. Exile quite likely meant death. Migration in search of greater opportunities had low chances of succeeding and high chances of worsening your lot—or death. Local and central authorities could have a much greater impact on any given individual with far more primitive tools of social control.

Meanwhile, today, even dictatorships that employ sophisticated modern surveillance technologies struggle to stop segments of their population from coordinating on political resistance or noncompliance. 63% of the world has access to the Internet by a recent estimate, meaning that people can instantly communicate with one another from disparate corners of a country or indeed seek resources or other forms of support from the rest of the world. This is a rather different situation than a medieval peasant found themselves in, and therefore a rather different one from what a medieval lord had to deal with.

One of the great challenges of analyzing elite influence on outcomes is determining the extent to which they are in fact influencing their base of support, and the extent to which they are simply attempting to give them what they want. Popular analysis of news media tends to assume that narrative framing and commentary have a strong influence on audience attitudes, but there is often an equally compelling case that both are simply reactions to what is already popular. Newspapers need subscribers and cable television needs viewers; their business model does not require them to change the behavior of their audiences to any degree whatsoever except to encourage them to read or view more frequently.

In seeking to explain the rise of nationalism in the modern world, many scholars have pointed to the self-conscious efforts of elites to cultivate it. Gat’s argument is that it actually reflects a demand from below, an ordinary desire by ordinary people, newly empowered by the conditions of the modern world to make demands of their elites. Whether this is truly the explanation for nationalism specifically, it is without a doubt the case that the elites of the modern world must come to terms with the demands of a very wide cross section of the overall population. This is precisely the strength of representative democracy, that it institutionalizes the competition for broad support among the political leadership of the country. And this is precisely the weakness of dictatorship, that it cripples many of the tools democracies have to keep a finger on the pulse of the masses. Indeed:

Successful non-democratic regimes have thus borrowed much from the institutional repertoire of representative democracies, using parties and elections to their advantage, ditching obvious and ineffective propaganda, and learning to live with more open public spheres.^[4]

Even rigged elections provide critical information to their regimes. This is the institutional strength of democracy in the modern era. But democracy, while an important tool for obtaining and maintaining an open society, is no guarantee of keeping one. For as Gat’s argument indicates, the resistance to openness often originates from broadly-held views and values. In the case of nationalism, this is playing out in our times most clearly in the call for closed borders—note the term!

But closed borders nationalism is hardly the only phenomenon to emerge from groups far too broad to meaningfully be called “elites.” The resistance to building new housing and especially apartment buildings by some of the existing residents of a neighborhood is practically a universal phenomenon in America, and not uncommon in the rest of the developed world. The result is that, while building even very tall apartment buildings is trivially easy from a technological and skill development point of view, there are incredibly high social and institutional hurdles to doing so. Moreover, this arrangement is very much one that is difficult to break out of now that we have entered it; though many would benefit from abundant new housing, only a few care enough about this housing proposal in this neighborhood to show up and do something about it, and those are overwhelmingly the locals who wish to stop it. Now that we have established the convention of consulting whoever shows up locally, it is difficult to break the arrangement without mobilizing significant resistance to the reform.

These two examples also feed one another. Once it becomes institutionally difficult to build housing, it becomes difficult from a purely practical point of view to be open to immigrants. Restrictive, stultifying social control builds the case for yet further restrictions.

Tailwinds towards openness

There are very few illiberal societies whose elites wish to go without the trappings of modernity. Their consistent dilemma is that, “On the one hand, everybody wants what modern prosperity offers—power, comfort, security, wealth. On the other hand, illiberals reject what makes modern prosperity possible—freedom, diversity, the continual churn of change.” Growth requires openness, at least to some degree. And the end result of years of successful growth is that a large minority of society—at minimum—gain the resources and capability to make trouble for regimes if they feel they are being ignored, strong-armed, or steamrolled. Factions of the governing elite may find a base for themselves by liberalizing in order to draw the support of these groups.

This is the “authoritarian modernization” path once seen as the primary way for developing countries to succeed. Rather than viewing it that way, I would argue it is simply an illustration of how difficult it is to outright resist the tailwinds towards openness in the modern era. There is a reason that totalitarian regimes turned out to be quite short-lived, and even while they lasted tended to go through cycles of reform in which they became successively less totalitarian.

Furthermore, open societies do have significant internal resources for resisting overly restrictive social control. Because of the ease with which citizens of an open society can form groups to try to safeguard their interests, the social scientist Douglass North and his co-authors argue that “If a group attempts to extract too much, then other groups who are normally not active on an issue are likely to begin paying attention and become active, with the potential to alter dramatically the political forces on this issue and hence the outcome.”^[5] This provides an incentive to moderate demands so as not to risk “mobilizing outsiders to become active” on that issue. Arguably, this is driving the success of housing reform politics in America today, with land use restrictionists having overreached quite far and eliciting a strong response.

Nevertheless, while there are tailwinds towards openness, while open societies avail themselves of some internal defenses, the creation and maintenance of open societies is not guaranteed. It exists in the realm of contingent accomplishments—in other words, the realm of politics. Defenders of the open society must constantly do the work of making a case for its value, both its practicality as well as its moral superiority.

And when matters have moved in a direction that threatens openness in some areas, we need to push our political elites to renegotiate the current bargains. Here in America, even a moderate on immigration who holds no great enthusiasm for openness can see that the status quo arrangement is an absolute disaster. A new bargain has been needed for decades. Unfortunately, Congress—the central institution for bargaining of this kind—is barely able to perform basic tasks like passing a budget, never mind funding the budgets it has already passed. A grand bargain on a highly salient issue like immigration? Difficult to imagine for the foreseeable future.

But that is what it takes, what it always takes: the hard work of persuasion and coalition politics. The upshot of how difficult it is to establish such bargains is that they become difficult to change once in place. If we can get better conventions established in immigration, and in housing, and in the other areas where restrictions have won out over openness, those conventions stand good odds of staying place for at least a generation. It’s not a radical constitutional overhaul, much less a revolution, but it is the kind of difficult but achievable result that allows an open society to keep muddling on for a few more decades yet.

[1] Black, Donald J. 1998. The Social Structure of Right and Wrong. Emerald Group Publishing. 4.

[2] Ginsburg, Tom, James Melton, and Zachary Elkins. The Endurance of National Constitutions. Chicago, IL: Law School, University of Chicago, 2010. 68-69.

[3] Gat, Azar. Nations: The long history and deep roots of political ethnicity and Nationalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. 16.

[4] Márquez, Xavier. Non-Democratic Politics: Authoritarianism, Dictatorship, and Democratization. London: Palgrave, an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, 2017. 243.

[5] North, Douglass C., John Joseph Wallis, and Barry R. Weingast. Violence and social orders: A conceptual framework for interpreting recorded human history. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. 128.

Featured image is The U.S. House of Representatives, Tuesday, September 23, 1890