By Douglas Kruger
WHICH one idea has contributed more to human flourishing than any other? Care to have a go?
This week, I got to speak on that topic for the Global Privacy Assembly, right here in Jersey, and the answer is fascinating.
Let’s set the scene.
Imagine it’s the 13th century and you are a wandering tradesman. Armed with your wares, you cross the English Channel, making for the city of London.
Business is brisk, but things take a bad turn. An Englishman defrauds you on a deal. With little hope, you appeal to the law and your case is heard.
Then something astonishing happens. The authorities rule in your favour. The Englishman is ordered to make restitution to you, by an English court. And so, you return home and spread the word: “England is a good place to do business.”
You’ve discovered that their law has two quirks. Firstly, it doesn’t belong to the local authorities. It’s a separate entity, the property of all. For that reason, it does not favour the interests of the powerful. It’s transcendent.
Secondly, it upholds the rights of the individual, as though every individual is inherently important.
The law is so effective that, when London burns to the ground centuries later, its local authorities are denied their bid to rebuild the place in straight lines. Their own courts uphold the property rights of the people of London, over the interests of the state. That’s why London is a rabbit warren today. Visually weird, yet a moral triumph. It made for higgledy-piggledy streets. But it also made for prosperity.
This revolutionary idea meant that every person who traded there had a chance at fair treatment. It was the beginning of a climb to great prosperity for Britain.
Not only would Britain become the wealthiest place on earth, but its ideas about protecting the individual would go on to inform the founding of America, which would supersede it with even greater prosperity.
This is what I think of as a “species-level trend”. A big idea whose impact resonates over great swathes of time.
I spoke about it at the 46th Annual Global Privacy Assembly this week, courtesy of the Jersey Office of the Information Commissioner.
The summit centred on protecting the rights of the individual, with specific focus on data.
But I got to zoom back a little and pose some challenging questions: “Why bother? Who cares about individuals? Doesn’t it make more sense to prioritise the wellbeing of the group as a whole? And as for the lowly individual, well, let the chips fall where they may?”
The answer is emphatically no.
When the individual is the protected entity, societies flourish. But when the group has primacy, great atrocities follow.
It’s deeply counterintuitive. So why did England get it right?
The answer is religious. And you don’t have to be religious to understand it. You merely need to observe how it functioned, and how it played out in the grand sweep of history.
It began several thousand years prior, with a Hebrew innovation that may be summed up in three words: “in His image”.
Today, we scarcely grasp the impact this idea has had upon human flourishing. We live in the slipstream of prosperity created by those who took it seriously over the centuries.
At its core was the assertion that man was no longer to be conceived of as just another pawn in the game. People were not useful possessions of the king.
Instead, each person was made in the image of God, and therefore, inherently valuable. An end in himself. By this way of thinking, all other interests and goals fall away. Individual sanctity becomes the goal.
That is a radical shift.
Give the notion several thousand years to percolate, and it strengthens into culture. Then policy. Then law. It goes on to form the cornerstone of what will be called Human Rights.
Yet the idea is by no means self-evident. Nor is it universal.
There are places even today where the law does the opposite, and the individual is dispensable. The group, the nation, the government… is everything. Human-rights abuses enacted in such places have beggared belief, and that’s when their people aren’t limping from one mass starvation to the next.
Where it was taken to heart, the idea became increasingly effective over time. By 1837, the British extended it beyond their own borders, in history’s first ever drive for global abolition.
Britain voluntarily purchased, and then freed, slaves, on such a scale that it took until 2015 to pay off that debt. That’s how much they were compelled to care about the suffering of individuals whom they had never even met.
Now let’s take an ocean voyage…
A series of ships travel across the seas to the New World, and they carry more than just people.
They carry the ideas that will become the cornerstone of the single greatest mass wealth-generating project in human history: the founding of the USA.
From time immemorial, authorities have “bestowed” rights. America’s founding fathers reversed it: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.”
In this new experiment, the individual has primacy. Not the king. Not the state. And he already has rights, not granted by any committee, but pre-existing, insofar as he is made in God’s image. Authorities may only construct a state insofar as it does not infringe on that first principle.
It’s the first time a constitution has been designed not to tell people what they may do, but to tell government what it may not. It may not alienate the rights of its individuals. They are free. They have inherent value. They are ends in themselves. The state may uphold their rights, but otherwise, it is to leave them alone.
The ensuing prosperity was meteoric. No nation or people have ever before seen such wealth, nor even dreamed it was possible.
And yes, they too had slavery early on. But their own constitution ultimately made it unfeasible, and it had to end.
When you protect the individual, incredible things follow. You get the highest living standards ever achieved by humans. You get levels of material prosperity previously unheard of. You foil slavery. And you liberate human talent, to the point where people start landing rocket ships backwards onto a platform in Texas.
And this week, Jersey was part of it all. We hosted a convention on protecting individual data, in a world where the powerful might otherwise use it against us. Who can quantify what good was achieved here this week, or what oppression warded off?
Well done, Jersey! That’s worth celebrating.
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Douglas Kruger is a global speaker, and the author of 12 books with Penguin. A transplant from Johannesburg, he lives in St Helier with his wife and son. Meet him at douglaskruger.com.
