What Makes Societies Thrive?

Featuring Johan Norberg

What made history’s golden ages thrive? Zachary and Emma speak with Johan Norberg, historian, documentary filmmaker, and author of Peak Human: What We Can Learn from the Rise and Fall of Golden Ages. Johan discusses what special societal qualities produced golden ages across history, as well as why these civilizations declined, what we can learn from their setbacks, and why the cyclical nature of history should bring optimism in today’s world. Johan also explores recent political developments in his native Sweden.

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Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription software errors.

Emma Varvaloucas: Are there common traits among societies while they’re at their peak?

Johan Norberg: Yes, there are. And I think most importantly, they imitate and they innovate. They’re not afraid to steal their best ideas from others by being open to trade migration, intellectual exchange. So they get a lot of ingredients and then they have to put them to work to come up with new combinations. So it takes some sort of openness to surprises.

Zachary Karabell: What Could Go Right? I’m Zachary Karabell, founder of The Progress Network. Joined as always by my co-host, Emma Varvaloucas, the executive director of The Progress Network. And What Could Go Right? is our weekly podcast, our longer form podcast, where we speak with scintillating, fascinating, compelling individuals about a whole we, us collectively, our society, our public sphere is obsessed with doom scrolling, is obsessed with the prospect of imminent collapse in Armageddon, is obsessed with Donald Trump’s first inauguration speech in 2017, the American carnage speech that we are in fact in the midst of the decline and fall of our civilization.

And yet, maybe not. Maybe we are focusing so much on all the problems that evidently ail us and they’re real problems. Not for one minute do we believe that the problems that we are focusing on are not real. They are. There is no climate denialism going on on this particular podcast. There is only the, How do we deal with the problems that we are creating and will we be capable of navigating our way through the present to a more constructive future and that one of the ingredients in that navigation is the belief and willingness to envision the possibility that things could go right, not just the awareness that they could and might go terribly wrong. And we’re gonna talk to somebody today who has looked back at what ingredients have past societies and civilizations had that has allowed them to flourish.

That is an incredibly relevant topic today as we contemplate whether or not we are in the midst of a decline or whether or not we are, like past generations, just dealing with the problems of our present. So Emma, please, if you would be so kind, tell us about our guest today.

Emma Varvaloucas: So today we. Are going to welcome Johan Norberg onto the podcast. He is a Swedish author and historian. He’s written several books. I kind of think of him sort of like Steven Pinker. He is like an OG Progress king. He has been in the progress game for a long time, so you may know his books Progress or Open.

But today we are going to talk about his new book, which is called Peak Human. And as Zachary just said, it is a study of different golden ages throughout history, why they rose, why they fell, and the importance of cultural optimism, openness, innovation, all of that good stuff. So are we ready to talk to Johan?

Zachary Karabell: Sounds like a plan.

Johan Norberg, what a pleasure to have you on what Could Go Right? and you have recently written a book in Open that is in many ways the historical articulation of What Could Go Right? in societies, meaning you basically wrote a book about what societies did to get it right to achieve a level of success and flourishing and golden ages.

I want to pursue that idea of golden ages a little more as we get into the conversation. ’cause it’s a, it’s both compelling and controversial. So ultimate softball question, why did you write about historical golden ages? I think we can all glean the potential answer, but even so, please do illuminate us.

Johan Norberg: Well, one reason is that I am obsessed with the strange fact that throughout history suddenly what used to be a periphery in Athens or the tiny city of Rome or Baghdad by the desert, suddenly had experienced creative explosions and they suddenly had lots of technological innovation, scientific discovery, and economic progress, and we have to learn some lessons from that if we want to create thriving societies, I think. But it’s also the case that the common denominator between golden ages is that they all decline and fell at some point. And you know, traveling around the world, going to the great cities of history, it’s a little bit sad once in a while to go there and think that this used to be the cradle of civilization.

Now it looks like an abandoned parking lot, and that forces you to think about also why is it that they didn’t manage to thrive sustainably long term? And perhaps that can give us some clues as to how to keep our civilization going a bit longer.

Emma Varvaloucas: Well, to pick up on that thread of abandoned parking lots and future abandoned parking lots. The last chapter is the Anglosphere, correct? So was this also part of what prompted the research and the book is this kind of narrative right now that we are going to soon experience a decline of that golden age if we’re not already in it?

Johan Norberg: Definitely, I think there are some worrying signs when it comes to our, the cultural atmosphere right now, and also some policies that seems to be less interested in this outward looking exploratory mindset and more worried about the world, thinking about how we can protect ourselves from everything else.

Yes.I worry that if these tendencies take hold that this could, we’re in for a rocky ride in the future and I wanted to warn that this is exactly the, a culture of pessimism is often a self-fulfilling prophecy. ’cause if you think that there’s no hope, you well, why bother? Why try and in that case, will we’ll give up and fail.

Zachary Karabell: You wrote this book long before whatever’s going on in the United States is currently going on in the United States. Certainly one of the hallmarks of open societies is open to syncratic different, and I guess sometimes heretical ideas as well, that you embrace the difference. You debate, you engage, you write about the golden age of Baghdad. I mean, one of the mythos of that time is there was this willingness on the, in the court of the caliph to have different faith traditions debate each other to see who got the better of the argument, right, to just be engaged and we see in the United States in the past months of 2025 in terms of the universities and the willingness to bring in foreign students, something that seems far more closed than open.

Now, I suppose the left, the right would say that the left had already intellectually closed the space in the west with various forms of doctrinaire ideological views about ideas that could not be spoken and debated. And I think there’s legitimacy to that argument. Is this to you, like the ultimate warning signof the kind of things that made civilization robust and strong that are likely to make it weak and collapse?

Johan Norberg: Yeah, if I had to identify one particular point in the decline of each of the civilizations I write about, I would call it something like the Death to Socrates moment, the moment when a culture sours on its tradition of intellectual openness and thinks that now we have to return to some sort of orthodoxy, something pure, and just get the troublemakers out of the way. If not forcing them to take poison, at least get them out of the universities. That’s always a troubling sign because it shuts off these taps of new ideas and innovations that might help to get you out of problems. And there is this tendency, I think both on the left and on the right, I think we had some of that on campus before Trump, and he was partly a reaction to that, how it was always worrying to have a speaker or a teacher saying something troubling that was uncomfortable to you, which used to be the very point of being at a university. Then now that culture has been politicized by the MAGA right, expelling foreign students, if they have the wrong ideas, trying to shut down universities, basically, if they don’t toe the line.

And, and yes, this is, I mean, we’re not forcing them to take poison yet, the troublemakers, but it’s indeed, it is worrying. This is the time to remember what makes our culture strong and rich.

Zachary Karabell: Now is a good time to invest in hemlock is basically your point.

Johan Norberg: I hope not.

Emma Varvaloucas: Is this whole true for all of the case studies that you did in your book where the decline of the golden age actually comes from a threat from within, as you say, you know, this rigidity, this orthodoxy, or is it also the case where sometimes it’s just a twist of fate, there’s a threat from without somebody invades or

what have you?

Johan Norberg: No, you’re right. It’s complex, obviously, and it’s, there are many horsemen of the apocalypse, so it’s climate changes that lead to crop failures and hunger. Foreign invaders, often there’s a pandemic, things that often results in tumult and chaos and problems.

However, in most instances, it’s possible to get out of it. We experience some of these problems in all of these civilizations a long time before they start to decline and fall. We can rebuild cities and recapture trade routes and wealth, but the one thing that’s very difficult to rebuild is this culture of curiosity, this culture of hope for a lack of the words.

That’s not killed by foreign invaders or by viruses. It’s that it’s more like it’s cultural suicide. When we begin to despair, fear, often when we face these obstacles problems, natural disasters, there’s often a moment when they lose this cultural self-confidence and begin to retreat inwards. Some sort of societal fight or flight instinct, basically, where we try to shut the world out or arm ourselves against it and that then unfortunately is this often this self-fulfilling prophecy of doom because that shuts off those, all the access to new ideas, new methods, the potential merchants and migrants who could have helped us to get out of the problems.

Emma Varvaloucas: I’m sure this is music to Zachary’s ears, and I’m actually a bit sad to hear you say that it’s difficult to come back from that because I had it on my list of questions of, Hey, how do you reverse cultural pessimism? Kinda the whole project of The Progress Network is to try to find a way to do that, but I’m curious if you have any other ideas or if it’s possible.

Johan Norberg: It is possible because we’ve faced problems like this before, and I mean close to our time, Europe tried to commit suicide at least twice during the 20th century, and we got back from it stronger in various ways. So it is possible and we often get some help through some sort of surprising, hopeful changes, could be democracies, triumphing over dictatorships in war. It might be technological economic changes that suddenly establishes the greater living standards and hope for the next generation. So that might help.

But in the end, I think we also need the cultural battle, a battle of ideas when it comes to this cultural sense of life, it’s not enough with an innovation in itself. You could have expected, for example, during the pandemic, the very fact that we managed to get mRNA vaccines, shots into people’s arms, within months, the most astonishing health triumph in history, that should have resulted in more of a hopeful culture, you would think.

But this, we had another cultural environment and it landed in a very politicized tribal atmosphere where suddenly instead we got this vaccine skepticism. We even got a health secretary in the US thinking that vaccines cause autism.

So it’s not enough with the productive forces and technological innovation to make us hopeful. We also need this battle of ideas so that we have a narrative of hope and optimism that triumphs.

Zachary Karabell: So let’s talk for a moment about you and your own intellectual journey, because you’ve had, I think, a, an interesting one. If you had thought about yourself today in your early twenties,I don’t know if you were an anarchist or whether you’ve described yourself as an anarchist or whether you were just a college anarchist, and I use that term a little pejoratively.

Like it’s one thing to be 21 years old in a cafe railing against the system while having a latte.

Johan Norberg: I was a self-described latte drinking anarchist. I even had an anarchist party. So yeah, I think that counts.

Zachary Karabell: So for those of you who are listening in the audio, I am now asking the question of anarchist with the air quotation marks. Even so, would you have been appalled at your current libertarian liberalism? I mean, what’s your pathway here?

Johan Norberg: Yeah, no, I think I would’ve been very surprised to find both this general sense of hope and optimism, but also channeling through the idea that business and technology can be a savior.because I didn’t use to believe that back then. I thought that the current state of the world, and I mean now we’re back in the eighties, it was pretty awful. I didn’t, I thought that industry and big business and big government ruined the world and ruined the planet. And I thought that there had to be some good old days in the past where we lived in harmony with one another and with nature, and I guess that’s partly why I do what I do now, because I learned that that was not the case. Starting to study history, I realized that my ancestors didn’t live ecologically. They died ecologically at a very young age when there was bad weather. There was crop failure in the north of Sweden in the late 19th century, and lots of family members died young, so famine.

And that kind of made me obsessed with the whole idea of progress because we can’t take it for granted. We should constantly be grateful for the fact that we belong to the one of the few generations in world history that have had lifespans of 70, 80 years free from extreme poverty and hunger. If I’m overly didactic or overly obsessed with these ideas, it’s because I’m trying to tell a younger version of myself about these things that I just.

Couldn’t get through my head at that time.

Zachary Karabell: I mean, that’s quite a cool way of articulating one’s own intellectual evolution. Maturization, I don’t know which I, I do wanna push this idea of golden age. ’cause you just articulated a, an awareness that you as a younger person had a more idealized version of the past. But isn’t part of the problem of talking about golden ages is that’s an inherently idealized version of the past.

So how do you square that particular circle? ’cause there is a danger, I think, in smoothing out the rough edges and at times far more than the rough edges, the nitty gritty, ugly, difficult reality of what pertained in these golden ages. You know, it’s one thing to look at the opposite court and go, wow, isn’t it great that they allowed intellectual fervor and debate?

They also executed people for ideas that suddenly were out of favor. I mean, it wasn’t, and you know, all this, I’m just, I guess I’m asking what’s, isn’t there a challenge in overdoing the golden age as a lens?

Johan Norberg: That’s a great point. And yes, there is that risk and it’s a constant dilemma when I think about it, when I write about it. And you know, Mary Beard, the great classicist. She points out that always when people are sort of, they are long for the Roman Empire. Wouldn’t it have been great to live in that age?

People always assume that they would’ve been emperors or senators, which is like a few hundred people. Most likely they would’ve been destitute farmers or slaves working in other people’s households or farms or in mines. So yes, there is that risk of idealizing past eras.

Zachary Karabell: By the way, just the interrupt. Everybody is always the, discovers their reincarnated version of King Louis or Marie Antoinette.

Emma Varvaloucas: I was about to say that!

Johan Norberg: Yeah.

Emma Varvaloucas: Always like a pharaoh.

Zachary Karabell: Nobody’s a reincarnated chambermaid, or like the person with the sweeping of the horse manure.

Emma Varvaloucas: Feudal peasant. Yeah.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah.

Johan Norberg: Isn’t that peculiar? Yeah. We all want an exciting past in every way.

So there is that risk. I think that what sets these golden eras that I identify apart from the contemporaries though, is not the poverty, the dirt, the slavery, the lack of women’s rights, because that was the natural thing in all these old contemporary civilizations.

What set them apart was that for a brief moment in time, they began to lift themselves out of that through at least relative to contemporaries, more freedom, more innovation, more exploration, and therefore also created living standards for the average person that was the envy of. Not just contemporaries, but often later generations as well.

But then it’s incredibly important not to think that, oh, that’s where we should be. Let’s go back to that golden era because that’s not the point. If you do what the Ming Dynasty did in China saying we should go back to some pure past, our old golden era and then force people to dress like they did 500 years ago and have the same ideas they had 500 years ago, and that leads to stagnation for 500 years.

Instead, what you should envy is that sense of optimism, that sense that there’s possibility we can, that energy and dynamism that these cultures had at their peak, and not the way they lived, but the way they looked at the future. That’s what I envy.

Emma Varvaloucas: No offense to both of you guys, but I do think it’s more of a male tendency to romanticize the past because as a woman, I feel like crystal clear that I would much rather be born now than at any time, essentially, so.

Zachary Karabell: Emma, wasn’t there that meme like last year about how many times a day the average American male thought about the Roman Empire, like that was sort of a joke that was going around?

Emma Varvaloucas: Oh yeah. Which turned a misogynistic meme because it was like, Hey babe, what are you thinking about? And it was like the Roman Empire. Like, men think about the Roman Empire and women are just worried about what their man is thinking about. So of course it turned into that.

But anyway, or Sparta. I feel like people are also very obsessed with Sparta right now. They all wanted to be Spartans, which like really you wanted to be trained to death, but sure. Anyway.

Johan Norberg: Yeah, Sparta. Sparta is not one of the golden ages. That’s the opposite. Even at their peak, they were a, a dark age, I would say. And interestingly, Sparta, a very regimented oligarchy where all the men were just basically training for war all the time. They didn’t leave us anything. No great architecture, no philosophy, sculpture, poetry. No great ideas, no music.

They only left us with names for sort of fraternities and American football teams because for some reason we admire that masculine energy. But they were hopeless compared to Athens, and they didn’t create anything that we could envy.

Emma Varvaloucas: I love that myth busting of Sparta. I wonder if you could do the opposite and pick one of your golden ages, perhaps one that people are less familiar with, and kind of walk us through the rise and fall just to make it a little bit less of an abstract conversation for people.

Johan Norberg: Right. Well, there are so many to choose from. Do, do you have a favorite?

Emma Varvaloucas: I don’t have a favorite. No, maybe not Athens. ’cause people are very familiar with it. I feel like Baghdad might be an interesting one.

Johan Norberg: Baghdad is really interesting and a little bit unexpected. You know, in the ninth century when great European cities like Paris and London had fewer than 20,000 inhabitants, they had half a million to a million inhabitants in a round circular city built to honor Euclid apparently, and his geometric thought because the caliph was a great fan of Euclid.

They were building early in the Islamic era, a vast empire, a vast free trade area from north Africa to Afghanistan, but centered in the Arab and Persian part of the empire. By having this openness for trade and also then governed by one system of law, Islamic law, that also meant it was kind of a rule of law, wasn’t possible to be governed too arbitrarily.

It meant that they were open to more ideas from various parts of the civilization. New crops that succeeded in new places they could thrive, they could urbanize, they could then improve all their trades and artisan trades. And in that way they created lots of wealth, but they were also crucially open intellectually, nothing like present day Islamic autocracies. But on the contrary, thinking that if someone’s can give us more knowledge about the world and the patents of natural laws, then that will benefit us. That’s all part of last creation, so let’s be open to. What Jews, what the Hindus, what the Ians the Christians say.

So they invited scholars, they invited scientists from not just the whole of the empire, but from all over the world. And then constantly trying to tell the Christians during the Dark Age that this is why we prosper and you fail because we’re open to more ideas so that science could progress, so that technology can progress and we don’t have to go longer than the letter A to realize how indebted we are to Arab culture in this that era. You know, arithmatic algebra, algorithms, Arabic numerals and stuff like that. We all borrowed that and we borrowed the Mediterranean capitalism to Europe, and that helped us to launch the Renaissance in the 14th and 15th century.

Zachary Karabell: So when you think about those moments, and again with the caveat that we just talked about that. You’re not saying that these were like unexpurgated, unmitigated goods. These were contextual in their time with a whole series of things that we would’ve found morally and physically untenable on an unacceptable if we were suddenly like beamed back into that moment.

And life was nasty British and short in all sorts of ways. Disease, sanitation, some places did that better as well, right? There was moments of golden age, golden sanitation age where people realized that cleaning waste from densely populated urban cores wasn’t just aesthetically pleasing, but better for collective health. And that too waxes and wanes over generations, interestingly enough.

So you beam us to the present, A western world that I guess arguably from the mid 19th century or the late 18th probably, right? The 19th has been characterized by innovation, intellectual openness, a certain pushing back against the strictures of religious orthodoxy.

And here we are with that kind of series of cultural mantras of openness and inquiry. Are we overdoing the sense in the present, just because there’s a bunch of governments that don’t like it and a bunch of people that don’t like it?

I mean, in the United States, I’m obviously more familiar with there’s been a long anti-intellectual tradition that rears its head, occasionally punitively. There was certainly McCarthyism and in from the late forties through the early sixties that squelched certain types of political debate. There were vast portions of the American South and Midwest in the late 19th and early 20th century where you couldn’t teach evolution.

So it’s, I mean, like, it’s not as if, and that’s certainly true in Europe as well, that there have been waxes and wanes. So I wonder if we’re overdoing, like there may be a little less relative openness in our present, but maybe we’re overdoing the fear relatively.

Johan Norberg: Yeah, I think it always waxes and wanes. I think this is more cyclical than linear, whether it’s the good linear or the bad linear. History doesn’t repeat itself, but human nature does. And I think that it is difficult to uphold this kind of intellectual openness and this openness to surprises because we are grown up as a species, homo sapiens, for a very long time, close to subsistence level in much more dangerous territory.

So if, if anything was wrong, if anything was suspicious, it could threaten your life. We’re very overly sensitive to threats from all sides, and that goes for, that definitely goes for why we often see a reaction against openness, against democracy, against science, but I think it also goes for the worry that we experience when we see those reactions, because we assume that this is the end of the world then and overreact.

But that overreaction might also be a little bit useful. We don’t know when the backlash against these ideas and intellectual trends are just cyclical or they break the system, so it’s necessary to get that signal to, to start fighting. I think that’s incredibly important, but I definitely agree we shouldn’t think that this is some kind of unique moment historically in terms of this backlash because it really isn’t.

Even the opponents of classical liberal Western ideals are very much foreign by that tradition compared to earlier generations.

Emma Varvaloucas: So let’s say that we are not in a waxing and waning moment. Let’s say that like this is a rupture and the decline of the Anglosphere is nigh. And you said earlier that we’re in for a rocky road, and I wanted to kind of double tap on that to use a phrase that one of our past guests use and that we use all the time now, a rocky road for people in the Anglosphere, a rocky road for people generally, because this is an idea that we’ve talked about on the podcast, Zachary and I, about how whoever comes in to be the next golden age, right? It could be somebody where the western world might not be particularly happy about. That doesn’t mean that their citizens wouldn’t be happy about that. There are also things that you could consider in the future, like an Indian led golden age, let’s say, which might be really great for the entire world, or there might be more of a balance of power amongst the entire world than there has been with the Anglosphere.

So what do you, what do you make of that?

Johan Norberg: Well, this is one thing that brings me hope. The fact that we are now a relatively connected world. We’re a global culture, not in terms of our ideals or our policies, but in terms of access to knowledge, access to technology. It’s never been this way and obviously that’s great for living standards. This is why this is the first Golden age where it, the rise in living standards is not just limited to one small area, but it’s actually global.

We reduced extreme poverty by some 130,000 people every day since 1990, it’s, and child mortality has been roughly cut in half. So it’s astonishing. It’s great. It also means that if we fail, if America fails, if Europe fails, there will be somebody else picking up the torch.

That wasn’t the case historically. If Rome fell, that was the end of civilization. When Baghdad collapsed, that was the end of that great era and all that knowledge had to be rediscovered again 500 years later or a thousand years later. That’s why they call it the dark age. That’s, I mean, if we can manage to avoid a nuclear apocalypse, I’m pretty sure that civilization will continue and thrive somewhere else ’cause there are so many policies where people have access to these iterate civilizations with access to the latest state of the art technology. And therefore we will also benefit from that as long as we stay open to that. So that brings me hope, even though it’s a rocky road.

Zachary Karabell: I wonder if you’ve thought about, I mean, I glean that you have thought about, but one question that we have a lot here is how much. Is of a golden age of an effluorescent time where people believe in the constructive capacity of their society to build a better world. How much of that reality is contingent on people having that belief, meaning how much does a collective belief of what I just said, that this is our moment, that we, whatever we is, have a capacity to shape the present and build a constructive present and future, how much is that a necessary ingredient for that reality that this sense of we are living in a golden age as opposed to some retrospective that was a golden age.

Is that a key ingredient? I mean, did you see in, did each of these societies live that belief in real time? And is that a necessary component in it being real?

Johan Norberg: I’m glad you raised that because I think this is absolutely crucial to creating any kind of thriving dynamic civilization because you know, you can stumble onto good ideas or innovations, but traditionally it’s hard to do it and to keep it going. It’s controversial. If you live close to subsistence level, you don’t want much novelty and innovation because if most innovations fail, and in that case you’d die, you wanna keep repeating what you’ve done as long as it’s kept you alive.

So you need some sort of cultural encouragement to tell you that this is not just possible, it’s even approved of it’s, it might even be rewarded if you come up with great new, strange ideas that benefit us. And you can see that in its absence. You know, Anton Howes has written a lot about innovation. He writes about how he’s shocked by the flying shuttle, you know, which made weaving much more productive during the Industrial Revolution and he points out that the strange thing about it is that it’s extraordinary in its simplicity. It required no special knowledge, no specific materials or technologies, just some string and two wooden boxes. So why didn’t it happen for 5,000 years? Any weaver could have come up with that through simple trial and error if they were a little bit eager to try out new things. But they didn’t for 5,000 years. Only then in Britain, in that kind of culture where they could see that it’s possible to try new things and you might even be getting some societal status if you do and perhaps some monetary reward as well. I think that’s incredibly important to get over this natural tendency to conservatism. That’s always part of our nature, and when we lose that, I think that, well we’ll cease to make progress.

This is one reason why we often see clusters of great discoveries and innovation from classical music in Vienna to computers in Silicon Valley or philosophy in Athens. You see other people doing it. It’s possible. You can also do it. You learn from them, you cooperate, you compete. We need that. Otherwise, we’ll just stop.

Emma Varvaloucas: Now for something completely different because I can’t resist having a guest on not from the United States. I have to ask you about just what’s going on in Sweden right now politically ’cause I feel like a lot of our listeners, it’s not exactly top of mind, particularly with the rise of far-right populism all over Europe.

It’s still like Sweden is not a country that gets brought up a lot in the American media on that front. So I’m just really curious if you could give us like a CliffNotes version of this is what the Swedes are talking about right now.

Johan Norberg: Right. Yeah. Swedes have for the moment, I think abandoned the Athenian mindset of going out into the world and explore and discover something new and replace that with a Spartan mindset that the world is dangerous and we should try to stay at home and arm ourselves against everybody else.

Part of a good reasons, Russia is close to us, so we have to think about. Security issues, but also combined with discussions about crime, about refugee immigration, where we haven’t always been great in integrating new groups of immigrants in Sweden. So there is this competition between the left and the right of coming up with the most, trying to keep us safe, stable, and secure right now.

And that’s one reason why in this past election we got a new center right government, and they are dependent on the far right forces in the Sweden Democrats, in the Swedish Parliament, and they are not doing as much as they could when it comes to opening up the Swedish economy and moving on to our next stages of development, they’re more into that kind of conservative agenda. On the other hand, I would have to add that in Sweden, the far right is quite moderate compared to many other places in Europe and even in America. When the Sweden Democrats are asked of what they think about American policies, they say they can’t support Donald Trump, at least, because he’s too far out when it comes to things, and they’re also because of this tradition of having Russia as a neighbor means that they’re strong supporters of Ukrainian democracy and want to continueto support their fight against dictatorship.

So it’s complicated.

Emma Varvaloucas: Medium distance right. In Sweden. Okay.

Johan Norberg: That’s right.

Zachary Karabell: Also you can put a little bit of a too fine a point on that. I mean, Sweden had a very potent defense industry for decades in the seventies and eighties in particular. It was one of the quiet, but potent armed suppliers throughout the world that always was maybe not intention with a liberal open society, but certainly set Sweden somewhat apart from its Scandinavian neighbors and others by being like it was, there was a war industry in Sweden.

Johan Norberg: That’s right, and formally nominally we were outside of NATO, so we also needed a stronger and an independent military and a defense industry and we exported everywhere to most places. On the other hand, we were always kind of defacto members of the NATO alliance. We always counted on America being there, which obviously then focuses minds today when we don’t know.

But Sweden joined NATO after Russia’s invasion just like Finland did. But now we don’t know what’s gonna happen in the future, and we might have to become more self-reliant when it comes to that. That’s a big part of the whole European debate right now. And part of that I feel is, I mean, it’s been embarrassing that Europe hasn’t been able to handle its own military defense in the past.

On the other hand, any kind of sudden rupture when it comes to world orders and defensive alliances is always a precarious moment because you don’t know what happens next and you don’t know what the potential enemies think about next. And there is, and obviously this is something related to the whole idea of the end of world orders and of golden eras. It might be that a specific rules-based order is being turned into something where we all have to fend for ourselves. And in that case we’ll do it. We’ll re-arm, we’ll start thinking about we might need nuclear weapons in the future and in if many countries think the same, that might make for a more dangerous world in the future.

Zachary Karabell: This is an interesting question about Sweden. Smaller, very affluent, high literacy, but ethnically homogenous societies before these recent waves of immigration. I mean, not a hundred percent ethnically homogenous, but largely, you know, as opposed to much more complicated roiling societies like the United States, like India, like Brazil, you have many more cross currents pointing, some toward a really closed society, the reaction in the United States trying to keep out foreign students, but oscillating a lot, decade by decade, year by year, geography by geography, group by group, within those societies that are going in all different directions simultaneously.

Certainly in the United States and elsewhere, there is this tendency to kind of romanticize some parts of western Europe. It’s like, oh, if we could just have better healthcare and collective social security system and take care of our own, right, more communitarian, without recognizing that there are conditions under which that pertains quite well, but they’re very difficult to scan into a system like the United States.

What do you think of the proposition that it is highly risky to over conclude and over extrapolate a present step backwards to permanent step backwards. Like we, we kind of know what’s roiling us right now and you’ve absolutely brilliant to point out the echoes that has of other societies that were beginning their downward spiral. I just wonder, maybe it’s a little too soon to make those conclusions about us now.

Johan Norberg: Yeah, there’s a lot of ruin in a nation and it can keep on going for a long time. I think it’s, every generation seems to think that their own present problems are the worst problems ever, and for good reason because we know that our ancestors dealt with previous problems. That’s why we’re still here, but we never know how to fix present problems.

It doesn’t mean that they’re worse. It doesn’t mean that they’re more difficult. On the contrary, we now have more knowledge and more technological capacity and more wealth. And also some historical lessons that’ll help us to deal with this. And this is something that I constantly remind myself of when I look at the world.

I also wake up in the morning thinking that, wow, this is, what a weird place, and it seems like things are going to the dogs, and quite often, but then you need that context to realize that this is not the end of the world and one thing I’m telling myself is that okay, but this time then look at what’s going on. Russia is destroying an independent country. There’s chaos in the Middle East, and American politics is tribal and angry, and the economy’s, world economy’s wobbly.

Well, yeah, that was 1956 when Russia invaded Hungary and we had the Suez crisis in the Middle East. We had bad tempered debates about segregation in the US and we had the Eisenhower recession was coming along. It was actually also the 1968, 1969, because then it’s the Six-Day War in the Middle East, Russia invades Czechoslovakia, and we have riots in America, assassinations of RFK and Martin Luther King Jr. And we’re in the Vietnam War inflation interest rate crisis and a new recession. And it’s actually also 1979 because Russia invades Afghanistan and we have the Iranian revolution fundamentalists taking over Iran, the brutal war with Iraq, Iran, Iraq, and we have in the US It’s beginning to feel like it’s the end of the American order because of the Iran hostages crisis, the energy crisis, inflation and interest rate at 12%. It’s the recession coming. The America’s moment is over.

So, you know, I’m not saying this because history always repeats itself, but problems do, but so do solutions and what do we eventually, how did we come out of all of this from 1956 until today?

Well, we increased life expectancy by some 20 years globally. We reduced extreme poverty globally from roughly half of the world’s population to one out of 10 people on the planet. So if you look past those headlines and that drama, and of course we shouldn’t because we have to pay some attention to the horrors and the drama as well. But we have to realize that most people then wake up in the morning looking at those problems, trying to come up with smart solutions, how to innovate our way around it, and coming up with better ways of creating a better and a safer and a richer world today than we had yesterday.

So that’s one reason why I’m not giving up even though I can sure see that there are some problems right now.

Emma Varvaloucas: It was a perfect ending, I think.

Zachary Karabell: That was indeed a perfect ending. I wanna thank you Johan for your work, for your insights, for your pointing out the rhyming trends, themes, notes of history, without overdoing the repetition part. I think that the way you ended with the, there’s a lot about the past that we can glean from, but the one thing that we can’t glean from is how to figure out our present.

In that that’s the virtue of looking backward. We know how the story played out and the always infinite challenge of the present is we don’t know how the story is going to play out. And a certain humbleness about that is in order. And I think one thing you point to in the past is some of that, meaning there are things and themes that you can learn from, but they’re not determinant either way.

Do you think people lose sight of what has made society strong and they’ve also lost sight of everything you’ve pointed out, which is there’s a lot while societies are strong, that at any given moment looks like the end and people you know they don’t know living through the present what the outcome is. We know when we look back.

I urge everyone to read Johan’s books, Open. The most recent book, Peak Human, available on a platform near you. Used to be available at a bookstore near you. Now it’s just available on a platform near you, audio, digital, print, you name it. And I guess we will see whether the present is the middle of a golden age, the beginning of a new one or the end.

But we, we might all be dead by the time we answer that question.

Johan Norberg: Or not.

Zachary Karabell: In the meantime, go read his books. So, or not right? I mean, we could be on the verge of the singularity. Whole other conversation, different podcast.

Johan Norberg: Thank you so much. Thanks for having me on the show.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah. Thank you Johan.

Zachary Karabell: So that was the perfect what Could Go Right? conversation. I suppose that episode was what has gone right rather than What Could Go Right? But at least it’s a, it’s at least it’s a look back at what has gone right in various societies, with the caveat of that doesn’t mean you’d want to trade those pasts for our present given what those paths were in relative terms to those moments in time.

It’s interesting, there used to be much more of that kind of writing and inquiry, like what are the lessons of the past in a way that was culturally present and center that I feel just happens less. I mean, that may be a function of social media and TikTok and Instagram and the way in which we collectively look for information, although some of the most popular podcasts are history podcasts, that there is a degree of which people, it’s not that people have suddenly stopped looking back, but I feel we didn’t get into this in the conversation, but in my lifetime, that kind of inquiry that Johan does felt to me much more like what everybody who thought they were an intellectual did in the 20th century, right? Trying to find these grand themes of history.

And I feel like maybe we do it a little now with Yuval Harari and people like Jared Diamond. But there is a kind of a quaint, anachronistic quality to the, let us look back and find the moments in the past that are parallels to our present.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah, I mean, I definitely think it has something to do with our information environment and our attention spans being quite literally shorter because I think that even as you point out that there are history podcasts, it’s less so like history podcasts doing original research and making original points, but moreso history podcasts are kind of, a lot of them to me are very like war based, military based counterfactuals. What would’ve happened if Germany won? Kind of thing. That’s what I’ve seen.

Anyway, I could be wrong about that. Listeners, feel free to tell me if I am wrong about that.

Zachary Karabell: But it doesn’t scan well to like an Instagram reel or a story or a TikTok, right?

Emma Varvaloucas: You are correct. This, I mean, the medium matters, right? I mean, we’re kind of getting off topic from golden ages here, but the medium certainly matters and the kind of deep thinking that goes into a book, you can’t do that on social media. You cannot do that in even a slideshow on Instagram.

Zachary Karabell: Right. You can promote a book, but you can’t really tell the story. And this idea of golden ages of what makes societies vibrant, I do think is important in that clearly we all do take a lot for granted in our present as like, this is how it is, so it ever was, so it ever shall be without recognizing that societies construct realities, right?

They construct morays, they create systems, and those morays and systems and beliefs and attitudes do in fact shape outcomes. And a lot of Johan’s book is a look at what are the ingredients that tend to be prevalent when societies flourish.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah. And I’m still very stuck on this question of like once a kind of rot has set in, right? Which I feel like in the United States, like there certainly is a kind of rot, maybe rot’s not the right word, but there is a, certainly a turbulence one that has set in, the process of rolling that back, like does that happen consciously or is it just like, you know, Johan said suddenly something happens and innovation or this or that? It’s frustrating ’cause it does kind of feel like it’s out of our hands in some ways. And I feel like humans respond the worst to those things that they can’t control.

And I guess the first thing to do is just kind of convince people that that project is worthwhile of their time and their energy, and I’m not sure that there are so many people out there that believe that it is, so.

Zachary Karabell: And that, I think that is a challenge. The apathy and despair are the things that you have to really guard against as opposed to passionate belief that we need to change or do something different, right? And yet Johan did at the end point out that there have been multiple times in a forward trajectory in the West and the United States over the past 60 or 70 years, where you could have made a credible case in the present that it was unwinding that the rot had set in.

And it hadn’t, it felt that way. It seemed that way. A lot of people believed that in that moment of time, 1956, 1979, 2001, but it wasn’t true or proved not to be true. This may be the moment where it proves to be true. It just behooves us to recognize that we have, there’ve been a lot of false harbingers. That doesn’t mean the problems aren’t real. It doesn’t mean that the threat isn’t present. It just means we might be overstating the threat relatively, and of course we won’t know until the future, right? There’s no way of knowing.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah. Or overstating the permanence of the impact. Like the threat is there, but yeah. Yeah. I mean.

Zachary Karabell: And that’s part of the whole point of these podcasts, which is maybe we’re overstating the negatives and underestimating the positives, and we should at least give due consideration to that.

So on that note, I wanna thank you all for listening. Thank you to the Podglomerate for producing and the team at The Progress Network for doing the nitty gritty work that is necessary for all good podcasts and open civilizations and please sign up for the newsletter, What Could Go Right? We try to use the same titles at theprogressnetwork.org and tune into our shorter form Progress Report where we highlight some good news of the week.

And we will be back with you next week.

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