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This essay is based on a keynote speech Ewing delivered recently for the Fraser Institute’s annual meeting in Dallas.
“We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.”
“Before you finish eating breakfast in the morning, you’ve depended on more than half the world.”
—Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. [ [link removed] ]
My wife, Maryrose, gave birth to our first child [ [link removed] ] this summer. The experience was amazing—and absolutely terrifying.
Three weeks before our due date, Maryrose discovered she had a rare, life-threatening condition. We live in rural Colorado and had to get to a specific hospital in Denver right away.
We were life-flighted in a small airplane together. Maryrose was strapped to a stretcher as we flew across the Rocky Mountains in silence. My heart sank as I asked myself, “Are my wife and son going to survive?”
We arrived at the hospital and met with a team of world-class medical experts. The only cure for Maryrose’s condition was to deliver the baby. She was induced and, while confined to a bed, connected to tubes and closely monitored, labored until our son was born.
He arrived healthy. We cried and celebrated. We named him Pearson Douglass: Pearson is a family name, and Douglass is in honor of the civil rights leader Frederick Douglass.  
Shortly after delivery, Maryrose had more complications. She was wheeled to the operating room and received multiple blood transfusions. I held my newborn as well as my breath, waiting in terror for Maryrose to return. Thankfully, she came back two hours later, exhausted but healthy.
That night, lying awake, I thought about how grateful I am for everyone who helped us. Our ordeal reminded me of a classic essay [ [link removed] ] by the philosopher Leonard Read, who explained how countless people work together to make the various things we enjoy in our modern world.
The materials for a simple pencil, he explains, come from places spread across the planet: China, Oregon, Sri Lanka and more. Lumberjacks, mill workers and truck drivers are all involved, and they use tools that many other people built. Add in the roads, trains, ships and communications systems—and all the people who built those—and we see thousands or perhaps even millions of people working together to make a pencil.
This same truth applies to most things humans build, from rocket ships to the plastic bags you use to pick up dog poop. They’re all the products of a mind-boggling network of human cooperation.
I think of the doctors and nurses at our son’s delivery. The machines and medicines they used—and all the innovators, philanthropists and scientists who helped make them. The pilot who flew us to Denver, and the craftsmen, engineers and metal workers who built the plane. And so on. 
Maryrose and Pearson are alive and healthy today because a vast network of people cooperated across time and space to save them. Virtually all our ancestors throughout history who were in my wife’s situation died, and so did their babies. But today, nearly all of them survive.
This vast global collaboration would not have been possible without a society based on classical liberal principles: the specialization of labor based on individuals’ desire and aptitude, the freedom for people to start businesses and research new ideas, the ability for nations to trade freely with each other and exchange information and so on.
As you read that previous sentence, the list of principles may have seemed dry and irrelevant. But if our society didn’t operate according to those principles, my wife and son might not have survived.
The Benefits of Liberalism
We live in a unique and amazing moment in history. I had the pleasure of listening to psychologist and author Steven Pinker [ [link removed] ] deliver a keynote presentation at the first annual Progress Conference [ [link removed] ] in Berkeley, California, on October 18. He drove home how humans have made tremendous progress in many pivotal ways:
Global life expectancy has more than doubled [ [link removed] ] since 1900.
GDP per capita [ [link removed] ] is at its highest point in recorded human history.
Women’s rights [ [link removed] ], LGBTQ rights [ [link removed] ], democracy [ [link removed] ], literacy rates [ [link removed] ] and basic education [ [link removed] ] have all skyrocketed in the past century.
Extreme poverty [ [link removed] ], violent deaths [ [link removed] ], famine deaths [ [link removed] ], infant mortality [ [link removed] ] and maternal mortality [ [link removed] ] have all plummeted worldwide.
Since just 1990, more than a billion people [ [link removed] ] have escaped extreme poverty. 
And when it comes to the environment, we’ve decoupled economic growth [ [link removed] ] from carbon emissions, battery prices [ [link removed] ] are plummeting, wind energy [ [link removed] ] is more popular than ever, hydropower has quadrupled [ [link removed] ] since the 1960s, solar is exceeding all predictions [ [link removed] ], clean nuclear power [ [link removed] ] is back, woodlands [ [link removed] ] are expanding, the Great Barrier Reef [ [link removed] ] has record coral cover and our oceans and rivers [ [link removed] ] are being cleaned up.
As historian Johan Norberg says, humans have made more progress [ [link removed] ] in the past 100 years than in our first 100,000. While the world is still awful in many ways, it is much better [ [link removed] ] than it used to be and can be even better. We can be the first generation [ [link removed] ] to build a sustainable planet.
Open Minds, Open Societies
The secret to our success, according to anthropologist Joseph Henrich [ [link removed] ], “resides not in the power of our individual minds, but in the collective brains of our communities.” We work together better than any species, sharing our ideas, skills and tools with other humans worldwide.
The incredible progress we enjoy today is the result of insights gained from drastically different cultures. The Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution sprang from Europe. But, as Norberg writes in his book “Open [ [link removed] ],” “Europeans learned Greek philosophy in conquered Muslim libraries, picked up scientific ideas in China and lost their certainty about the universe by finding strange things on new continents.”
Every golden age in history was alike in being open: the Phoenicians, the Maurya Empire, the classical Greeks, the Romans, the Abbasid Caliphate, the Song Dynasty, the Dutch Republic, the European Enlightenment and the United States.
When societies are open—to new ideas, customs, people, goods, services and technologies—they flourish and drive civilization forward.
The case of China illustrates the crucial importance of openness. A thousand years ago, China’s Song Dynasty was the wealthiest, most open society the world had ever seen. It was multicultural, technologically sophisticated (including innovations such as printed books and gunpowder) and tolerant of diverse and potentially dangerous ideas.
Imagine what the most brilliant minds of the Song Dynasty dreamed of when they looked into the distant future. Surely, they saw a fantastic world of prosperity, peace and innovation. And yet, if they could travel forward in time to the mid-20th century, they would see nothing but the darkest depths of depravity.
By 1960, China had become a closed society, clamped shut and suffocated. Instead of open-minded debate, there was complete control of speech and thought. The vibrant markets were replaced with barren fields. There were no visitors from the outside world. The people were starving on a scale humanity had rarely seen—millions died while the living were forced to eat roots, bark and even one another. Their world was a crushing, nightmarish prison unimaginable to the enlightened people of the Song Dynasty.
China is a dramatic example of what has happened to every previous open society in history. Eventually, they all closed. In every case, free thought and free speech gave way to censorship and suppression. Open doors closed as foreigners were met with suspicion. Free markets were quashed. Innovation stagnated, and prosperity slipped away. To avoid the same fate, we must hold fast to the liberal principles of openness and freedom.
What Is Liberalism?
Modern liberalism can be considered the enlightened defense of the open society. By liberalism, I don’t mean the philosophy of left-wing Democrats, as the term is often used in the United States, or selfish individualists, as it’s used in France.
Emily Chamlee-Wright, the president of the Institute for Humane Studies, explained to me at the Progress Conference that liberalism has four foundational and interconnected pillars [ [link removed] ]: political, economic, cultural and epistemic.
Political liberalism: equality before the law, democratic self-governance
Economic liberalism: open markets embracing exchange and innovation
Cultural liberalism: peaceful co-existence of diverse people
Epistemic liberalism: critical thinking with open minds eager to learn
We can think of liberalism as a big tent open to conservatives, progressives and libertarians alike. A liberal is anyone willing to defend the open society: open minds, open doors and open markets. 
The philosopher Jonathan Rauch writes [ [link removed] ]: “Liberalism has delivered spectacular results. It is the greatest social technology ever invented, and well ahead of whatever comes second.” 
Yet liberalism is under attack today by enemies around the world and also here at home. Ideologies on both the left [ [link removed] ] and the right [ [link removed] ] seek to close minds, close doors and close markets. We are in danger of reversing our incredible trajectory of progress.
Stories and Social Change
We must defend our open society, but there’s no clear, centralized path to do this. Philosophers, innovators, entrepreneurs, policymakers and activists all have a role to play. My expertise is in communication, so that’s where I’ll focus.
Social change begins with ideas and eventually produces policy change. People often think that good ideas can quickly be implemented as policy, but policy is beholden to politics. And politics is downstream from culture, which in turn is downstream from the stories we believe about ourselves and our communities.
Consider how marriage equality came about in the United States. It’s hard to believe that just a dozen years ago, mainstream Democratic icons including Barack Obama [ [link removed] ], Hillary Clinton [ [link removed] ] and Joe Biden [ [link removed] ] all opposed marriage equality. As the authors Peter Kiefer and Peter Savodnik explain [ [link removed] ], “The original run of ‘Will and Grace [ [link removed] ]’ (1998-2006) did more to advance the cause of gay marriage than anything” before the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling [ [link removed] ]. One story on one TV show changed the culture in our country. Politicians and policymakers follow rather than lead these cultural trends.
By contrast, nuclear energy stagnated for half a century not because of flaws in the technology but because of the stories surrounding it. Misguided activists conflated safe, clean, green nuclear energy with nuclear weapons. As a result of shutting down and stagnating nuclear energy, many millions of people have died from air pollution, and climate change has been exacerbated.
Storytelling in Action
The stories we share influence our culture, politics and policies. They determine how we see ourselves and the world around us. And they can communicate important ideas and principles—and create emotional investment and buy-in from their hearers—in ways that dry, straightforward argumentation often can’t.
The narrative of Sandy Meadows illustrates just how effective storytelling can be. Sandy loved flowers, so when her husband died and she needed a job, she applied to work in the floral department of a local grocery store in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. She excelled at the job and was soon promoted to manager.
Working with flowers gave Sandy the solace she craved and the money she needed to support herself. But there was a problem: In the state of Louisiana, people who wanted to make floral arrangements at work had to get a special license from the government. Applicants for this license were required to take a test that was graded by existing florists. Of course, these florists had an incentive to discourage competitors from entering the market, so the test was notoriously tough, with a higher failure rate than the Louisiana bar exam.
Sandy tried to pass the test five times. She failed every time, not because she wasn’t good at arranging flowers but because the test was deliberately designed to be difficult and arbitrary.
An attorney named Clark Neily [ [link removed] ] from the Institute for Justice teamed up with Sandy to challenge the law [ [link removed] ] in federal court. In response, the state government cracked down on Sandy’s grocery store, which was forced to fire Sandy and replace her with a licensed florist.
The last time Clark saw Sandy, she was outside her apartment, a semi-assisted living facility for low-income people. She had recently had surgery and was lying down in a common area with a set of staples extending across her stomach. A neighbor was fanning her. Sandy had no car, no phone, no job and no electricity. Her power was cut off because she couldn’t pay her bills. It was about 100 degrees outside with sweltering humidity, and Sandy was in a great deal of pain.
Clark helped her check into a hotel with air-conditioning and returned to D.C. Tragically, he found out a few weeks later that Sandy had died, alone and in poverty, because of this illiberal Louisiana law.
I worked with Clark at the Institute for Justice. I’ve heard him tell Sandy’s story several times. Without fail, the audience has a visceral reaction. They understand the law is bad. By contrast, I’ve sat through boring lectures from academics that explain occupational licensing with jargon and statistics. Their audience’s eyes tend to glaze over. Sometimes a two-minute story like Sandy’s will do more than a two-hour lecture to educate an audience and get people to care.
Importantly, the fight continued after Sandy’s death, and eventually the Louisiana law was struck down.  
A Better World
The philosopher Karl Popper, author of the classic “The Open Society and Its Enemies [ [link removed] ],” wrote:
The possibilities that lie in the future are infinite. When I say “It is our duty to remain optimists,” this includes not only the openness of the future but also that which all of us contribute to it by everything we do: we are all responsible for what the future holds in store. Thus it is our duty, not to prophesy evil but, rather, to fight for a better world.
To advance liberalism and the open society, it’s not enough merely to know the ideas and cite the statistics. We must also be able to communicate those ideas in an effective way so that we can work together in the fight for a better world.

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