One doesn’t need much detailed historical knowledge to be struck by just how recent many of the most deeply held moral and political convictions in the modern West are. Prior to just a few hundred years ago, it would have been considered eccentric (at best) or seditious (at worst) to make a general case against evils such as corruption, slavery, discrimination, or the entanglement of religion and politics. The reaction would be – and not without some justification – that’s just how the world works. Compared not only to the vast sweep of history, but also to much of the non-Western world today, our sensibilities are markedly W.E.I.R.D.
The West’s own mythos deals with this problem by drawing a line from the Reformation through the Enlightenment, where people gradually realized that these evils were not, in fact, how the world works, and sloughing them off, they opened the door for moral and political progress.
Noel Johnson and Mark Koyama’s book, Persecution and Toleration: The Long Road to Religious Freedom, focuses on one particular element in the constellation of liberal virtues – religious toleration – and tells a story very much at odds with our triumphalist mythos. The contrast between our own distinctive convictions on the virtue of religious tolerance and those of our ancestors is due neither to the particular viciousness or ignorance of the premodern West, nor to the particular virtue or insight of the modern West. Instead, they argue, the institutional developments that resulted in modern centralized states, set in motion for mostly quite illiberal reasons, made religious toleration possible in a way that it had not been prior.
If this argument is true of religious toleration, it is probably true of the whole set of distinctively liberal values and freedoms. And if so, the triumphalist mythos may render us complacent in the face of threats to the viability of liberal values. Understanding just what made liberal values viable starting in the late 1700s, and why they were not before, will be crucial to their survival into the future. This is precisely what Persecution and Toleration sets out to do.