My latest Wall Street Journal column, Triumph of the Idea Smugglers, argues that
from time to time in history good ideas need rescuing from bad
regimes. If Thales of Miletus had not infected Greece with
rationalism after travelling in Egypt, and if 1700 years later,
Leonardo Fibonacci had not infected Italy with Hindu numerals after
growing up in what is now Algeria — then these ideas might not
have flourished.
The secret of human progress is and always has been to
keep ideas moving, both so that they meet and mate with new ideas
and so that they escape suppression at home. As the philosopher
David Hume was the first to observe, China suffers from a
geographic disadvantage in this respect: It is too easy to unify.
When disunited it grows rich and innovative. But time and again
emperors, from the Ming to the Maoist, have been able to establish
tyrannical centralized rule and shut down trade, diversity and
experiment.
Europe, with its centrifugal rivers,
its peninsulas and mountain ranges, is very hard to unify by
conquest. Ask Constantine, Charles V, Napoleon and Hitler. So
European states could harbor commercial, intellectual and religious
refugees from each other, keeping flames alive. The history of
technology is littered with examples of Europeans who fled from one
jurisdiction to another to a find a more congenial or generous
ruler: Columbus, Gutenberg, Voltaire, Einstein.
Today, Chinese censorship
notwithstanding, ideas can flit across borders quicker than
thought. We can do with a few mouse clicks what Fibonacci had to
take a leaky galleon across the sea to achieve.