Who are the Gatekeepers?

June, 2026

Progress is humanity’s triumph over the nature. Or so the story goes. What if progress is actually something we are subject to, rather than something we control? And if this is true, how do we direct progress where we need it most?

Let’s begin with Mokyr’s A Culture of Growth. He tells a compelling story explaining the unique cultural conditions that produced the Industrial Revolution in Europe. First, I will refactor his story into heroes and villains and use that lens to examine what causes progress. Then we will see if the exception proves the rule: why does political progress stagnate as technological progress compounds?

I will sort Mokyr’s heroes and villains into two categories: ideas and mechanism. First his hero-ideas. In the epilogue he highlights two ideas that helped start the Industrial Revolution leading to modernity:

• “…the concept that knowledge and the understanding of nature can and should be used to advance the material conditions of humanity…” (p. 341)
• “…the belief that power and government are there not to serve the rich and powerful but society at large.” (p. 341)

Now his hero-mechanism. He describes most cultures before the Industrial Revolution as backward-looking. This makes it difficult for new ideas to proliferate. He proposes a mechanism that freed people in that time and place to adopt new useful knowledge:

• A few impressive cultural entrepreneurs, particularly, Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton, made the ideas high status
• Because those ideas and scholars were high status, nation-states competed by offering scholars patroned positions with intellectual freedom protections from other rulers and religious institutions
• Scholars made a name for themselves and created the opportunity to secure a patroned position by sharing knowledge across borders via the Republic of Letters

Mokyr’s widely held villain-idea was that the world deteriorates. He calls these cultures backward-looking. Yesterday was better than today, and tomorrow will be even worse. Backward-looking cultures venerate old ideas. Since the past was better, the writings of ancient philosophers and religious texts are the source of truth and respected objects of study, and anything contradicting them is dangerous.

“If the culture is heavily infused with respect and worship of ancient wisdom so that any intellectual innovation is considered deviant and blasphemous, technological creativity will be similarly constrained. Irreverence is key to progress.” (p. 17)

Mokyr’s villain-mechanisms are the institutions that incentivize backward-looking practices. Religion, in particular Catholicism, as well as Aristotelian philosophy¹ are the backward-looking institutions he identifies in Europe. In China, the culprits are Confucianism and the imperial assessment system.

Mokyr tells a clean story. Our valiant secular heroes overcome the narrow-minded religious authorities. But let’s complicate this story by examining one of his villain-mechanisms: Christianity.

The Bible is Christianity’s source of truth. And if Christianity is backward-looking, we’d expect the content of the Bible to be backward-looking. However, Richard Middleton² makes a sharp observation in The Liberating Image. He explains how kings in the ancient near east claimed to be gods, or the image of a god. This meant kings uniquely had that god’s authority to rule both people and nature. In this context Middleton re-examines the Hebrew Bible’s claim that all people are made in the image of God. He also highlights the significance of the command in Genesis 1:28 that humans are to “fill the earth and subdue it.” All people are created in the image of God and have his delegated authority to rule the earth.

We can transpose Middleton’s reading of Genesis into two pertinent observations mapping onto Mokyr’s hero-ideas:

• The knowledge of nature should be used to advance human conditions. In Genesis, productive, creative, manipulation of the environment is the second direct command from God.
• Power should be used for the benefit of all people. In Genesis, the responsibility to productively manipulate the environment, and presumably the associated benefits, are for all people.

The resonance is striking, and it poses a puzzle. If these ideas caused progress, then it follows that Christians or Jews reverently looking backwards on the Bible should have become forward-looking. Was this in fact what happened? Is Christianity the intellectual substrate that caused the Industrial Revolution in Europe and not China? Is Christianity a hero, and not the villain Mokyr suggests it is?

These are the wrong questions to ask. Christianity and Judaism were thousands of years old when the Industrial Revolution happened. They cannot be the causal factor. Instead, this helps us better understand the dynamic between ideas and mechanisms. The progress-causing ideas stayed dormant even though Christianity and Judaism were held by many cultures over thousands of years. The effects of good ideas are conditional on mechanisms to realize them.

This clarifies the questions we should ask. What made backward-looking cultures so dominant? And why did they lose their dominance? To answer, let’s shift our focus to another set of Mokyr’s characters. The first are cultural entrepreneurs, whom he describes as:

“…the individuals who successfully contested and overthrew existing authorities in a specific area of culture and created a competing variant…” (p. 60)

You can think of individuals like Galileo, Marx, Darwin, and Martin Luther. The second are the existing authorities cultural entrepreneurs compete with. I will call them gatekeepers, and they will be the focus of my analysis from here.

As the established authorities, gatekeepers have a lot of influence over the beliefs available to a population. If the cultural entrepreneurs have to earn attention, gatekeepers have it by default. Before the Industrial Revolution gatekeepers had a revealed preference for their cultures to look backward. We must understand why gatekeepers have this preference to understand why backward-looking beliefs were so dominant.

Let’s build out the game gatekeepers are playing. Gatekeepers must manage two contenders. The first are internal contenders, or the people they rule. For our purposes gatekeepers and their people make up a state. The second are external contenders, or other states.

For most of human history, the primary tool gatekeepers use to manage external contenders are their internal contenders. If another state threatened their land, gatekeepers raised up an army, either to deter a conflict, or go to war. States’ technology was not differentiated for the most part. The same armor, weapons, and chariots available to one state were available to the others. So, the salient variable gatekeepers influence is the number of people willing to join the army. And how do gatekeepers raise up people to join their army? By stewarding culture³.

Let’s ground this claim by using the same definition Mokyr does; he uses Boyd and Richerson’s (1985, p. 2) definition of culture:

“Culture is a set of beliefs, values, and preferences, capable of affecting behavior that are socially (not genetically) transmitted and that are shared by some subset of society.” (p. 8)

It follows from that definition that culture functions as a unifying force that directs internal contenders toward productive ends. And gatekeepers most directly steward the culture. Gatekeepers can influence the behavior of internal contenders by shaping their society’s shared set of assumptions. Culture includes assumptions about who is good, and who is bad. They usually provide a sense that the current order is ordained by some higher power. And often this is enough to pacify internal contenders, and when needed, direct their energy toward the external contenders. For gatekeepers, culture’s utility comes from its ordering capacity.

An example makes this tangible. In 1095 Pope Urban II had several external contenders: antipope Clement III who claimed the papacy, and the Turks who were actively taking land under Christian influence. Simultaneously, the nobility in France and Spain were fighting each other for resources. Robert the Monk records Urban II as saying:

“This land which you inhabit, shut in on all sides by the seas and surrounded by the mountain peaks, is too narrow for your large population; nor does it abound in wealth, and it furnishes scarcely food enough for its cultivators. Hence, it is that you murder one another, that you wage war, and that frequently you perish by mutual wounds. Let, therefore, hatred depart from among you, let your quarrels end, let wars cease, and let all dissensions and controversies slumber. Enter upon the road to the Holy Sepulchre; wrest that land from the wicked race, and subject it to yourselves … God has conferred upon you above all nations great glory in arms. Accordingly, undertake this journey for the remission of your sins, with the assurance of the imperishable glory of the Kingdom of Heaven”

Here we see a gatekeeper masterfully manage culture to secure his position. He redirects internal contenders’ unproductive violence against each other to assemble an army used to neutralize the Turks. And by setting a holy mission, Urban affirms his legitimacy as the true pope over Clement III.

From this perspective, why do they prefer backward-looking cultures? If culture’s utility is its ordering capacity, and the old ideas affirm the legitimacy of gatekeepers’ current position, new ideas are dangerous. There is no upside to entertaining heliocentrism, especially if it seems to undermine Biblical cosmology. Best case, gatekeepers maintain the current order despite the new idea; more likely, the current order is disrupted, which is bad.

Furthermore, we see the content of culture becomes almost irrelevant as long as it has ordering capacity. Never mind Christianity’s history of non-violent enemy love. The forgiveness won by a God who willingly died on a cross is offered to those who murder in his name. Ideas are domesticated by power and directed toward its ends, whether Christian or Confucian. And this is why Mokyr’s hero-ideas, despite their prevalence in Christian and Jewish thought, were not sufficient to cause the Industrial Revolution.

Now we understand why gatekeepers preferred backward-looking cultures. So, how did Mokyr’s hero-mechanisms disrupt this equilibrium? The particular culture and institutions in Europe created an incentive system that revealed culture’s latent utility beyond its ordering capacity. This is the core of Mokyr’s argument: the pursuit of useful knowledge became high-status; gatekeepers, to increase their status, patroned scholars; scholars had to be known to secure a patron; so they shared their findings via the republic of letters; the competition between gatekeepers creates something like intellectual freedom: if a scholar was persecuted for their work in one state, they could flee to another and be welcomed with open arms.

Mokyr illustrates this dynamic by recounting the journey of Johann Joachim Becher (1635–1682):

“…a German alchemist, engineer, and entrepreneur, one of the founders of phlogiston theory, who worked alternatively for a variety of German rulers, including the elector of Bavaria, the emperor, and smaller German princes as a court scientist and counselor, moving each time that his enemies and rivals got the better of him. Becher’s ability to exploit the political fragmentation in Europe bordered on the virtuosic, enabling him to move rapidly between the Imperial court and various German princedoms. In Vienna he was able to play the Habsburg emperor against his own Hofkammer. When his German patronage ran out, he ended up in England in 1680 (Smith, 1994).” (p. 177)

Our gatekeeper lens illuminates this dynamic: it forced gatekeepers to tolerate new ideas for a prolonged period, and this yielded surprisingly useful knowledge and technologies. Technology amplifies the agency of its users. If external contenders use it, they now have an advantage. Firearms increase capacity on the battlefield. Medicine increases the number of healthy people available to join an army. Manufacturing amplifies anything you apply it to. Scientific precision makes it all legible. And so, gatekeepers must develop and distribute technology to the people if they want to keep up with other states.

This is why the Industrial Revolution takes a long time to start, but once it does, it is highly contagious. It was non-obvious that culture had utility beyond its ordering capacity. China’s relative stability and imperial assessment system was so effective it continued down the default, backward-looking path. It lacked the environment of competing states that forced Europe’s hand. However, once the latent utility of culture for progress is discovered, adopting it becomes an existential necessity. Otherwise other states will out compete you in every way. This is why we see an explosion of industrialization and colonization sweep the globe: gatekeepers either pursued progress or were dominated by those that did.

Progress began because of this happenstance mechanism, and stayed because it was useful to gatekeepers. Mokyr’s hero-ideas were not enough. They were seeds scattered on rocky ground, and they could not take root until gatekeepers were beguiled into cultivating them. At which point they discovered ideas can cause progress, and progress is useful. Power⁴ is both hero and villain of Mokyr’s story: gatekeepers resist progress when it threatens culture’s ordering capacity; they tolerate progress when status compels them to; they frantically pursue progress once it is needed for state competition.

This is a clean story. Progress becomes useful to gatekeepers, starting a self-reinforcing cycle driving it to this day. But this story is complicated when we more closely examine progress, which I’ll split into siblings: technological and political progress.

Mokyr’s focus, the Industrial Revolution, is the birth of our first brother, technological progress. A parallel event, the Enlightenment, is the birth of political progress, our second brother. This makes sense. Mokyr’s heroes benefit both scientific and political thinkers. We learn to use nature to our benefit, and we begin actively managing power to our benefit.

And progress becomes an existential necessity because it yields an advantage over external contenders. This observation is true for technological progress. Better use of nature is a clear exponential that does not retreat. The steam engine is never uninvented. Even the printing press, which can be used to quickly spread dangerous new ideas is never undone⁵. Instead gatekeepers use the tools produced by technological progress to manage internal and external contenders. The printing press is used to amplify gatekeepers’ account of reality.

The observation buckles when we examine political progress. The Enlightenment establishes a promising trajectory: property rights are established, separation of powers is instituted, and subjects become citizens. But political progress lapses in ways technological progress does not. Slavery is ended, but Jim Crow is established in its wake. The French revolt, but the system they establish is more brutal than the one they displace.

The contrast is striking and poses a puzzle. If political and technological progress are both beneficial to the state, they should have grown together. Does this mean political progress is actually bad for the state? Does distributed power create an ineffective and slow bureaucracy? Does democracy plant the seed of its own destruction?

These are the wrong questions to ask. This is clear when you compare democracies and dictatorships. Democracies are more economically successful and enjoy a significantly higher standard of living⁶. Political progress cannot be a state-level disadvantage. Instead, this helps us see that political progress is victim to something its brother is immune to. We look forward on technological development, fully expecting tomorrow’s computers and cars to be better than today’s. But we look backward on politics, often believing yesterday was better than today, and tomorrow will be even worse⁷. Only, instead of Aristotle, we look back on Madison.

This clarifies the questions we should ask. If political progress is good for the state, why is it systematically neglected? And why is technological progress immune? To answer, let’s once again examine our gatekeepers.

Both gatekeepers and the people want their state to survive. This means their incentives are aligned when it comes to managing external contenders. However, their incentives diverge when they relate with each other. The people are internal contenders for the gatekeepers and vice versa. This is the key to understanding why technological progress outpaces political progress.

We know technological progress is good for managing other states. Firearms, medicine, manufacturing, and scientific precision are all instances of technological progress that help state competition. And for gatekeepers, it is also usually good for managing the people. Heliocentrism and Christianity learn to coexist; natively secular belief systems evolve to accommodate scientific metaphysical assumptions. So the people and gatekeepers both pursue technological progress. Technological progress can be harnessed by power and directed towards its ends⁸.

Political progress is also good for managing other states. Citizen armies are more effective than subject armies. Freedom of thought attracts talent. Democratic states are more resilient. However, for gatekeepers, political progress is not good for managing the people. It disrupts gatekeepers’ power accumulating cycle. Instead of a predictable span of control they can slowly expand, gatekeepers would have to deal with dynamic power distribution, which feels risky. Gatekeepers neglect political progress because it is not in their interest, even though it is good for the people and the state.

In the late 1700s through early 1800s the American colonies faced a clear two contender problem. England, France, and Spain were all potential external contenders. And as a federation of independent states, there were several volatile internal contenders. To unite the colonies, James Madison clearly articulated the danger of power and its tendency to accumulate; he proposed a multi-state system to distribute and restrain it — occupy power by having it fight itself⁹.

The colonies accepted this proposal and established themselves as the United States of America. Madison’s vision was realized! And he worked to protect the integrity of his fledgling political system. He famously opposed Alexander Hamilton’s effort to create a national bank because it would be too powerful. Madison believed the bank would become a faction capable of starting the power accumulating cycle. Madison went as far as creating a new political party with Thomas Jefferson to oppose Hamilton’s project. They were successful in becoming the third and fourth presidents of the United States. But once Madison held power, the equation changed. Madison ratified Hamilton’s doctrine of implied powers by re-instituting a national bank to manage the War of 1812’s financial fallout.

Here we see power masterfully steward gatekeepers, but not in the way we expect. Madison probably made the right decision to re-establish the bank. The state might not have survived without it. This is why political progress is not the same as distributed power. When people have power, they hold on to it just as fiercely as gatekeepers¹⁰. Political progress is the ability to direct power for our benefit. Both centralized and distributed systems suffer different tyrannies of power. Democracy’s tyranny is better than a dictator’s tyranny, but it is tyranny nonetheless.

Madison’s error was the means, how he instituted the national bank: he ratified Hamilton’s doctrine of implied powers, where the federal government can do anything reasonably connected to its constitutional powers, by appealing to precedent. The three branches accepted the bank, so regardless of how it was established it was now constitutional. But the bank wasn’t the faction that would become too powerful. It was the federal government and Executive branch with this permanent, open-ended capacity. The doctrine of implied powers continually concentrates power, eating away at the ability to direct power where it would be most beneficial. Despite Madison’s best intentions, state competition forced him to use means that undermined political progress, even though the end was good¹¹.

This raises a question: is consistent political progress even possible? The answer is clear when we examine the engine of progress that creates new useful knowledge: the experiment, and where it is applied. Experiments are indiscriminately applied to technological problems. New knowledge is created and distributed, creating smooth, compounding, progress.

Experiments are selectively applied to politics. They are applied downward, where citizens are the object of experiment. Candidates use them to A/B test campaign messaging. They are used to evaluate voter behavior. The United States has 50 distinct political systems that are constantly trying variations of policies, speed limits, and school curricula. But experiments are not usually applied upward, where rulers and the structure they inhabit are the object of experiment. Despite the natural variation across 50 states, the laboratory is rarely pointed at the entity creating the policies. Would sunset clauses work better if you could only renew them once? Are legislative branches more effective with one, two, or three houses¹²? Would a dedicated emergency branch of government stop the executive branch’s slow accumulation of power?

Political progress’ failure mode is one of gravity. Power accumulates because it is used to increase power. This is why downward experiments are popular. Once a political system is established, downward experiments create useful knowledge gatekeepers use to better manage the people. However, upward experiments undermine gatekeepers’ position over the people. Political progress is a maintenance problem. We have the tool to work on it. But we haven’t yet.¹³

For now, progress happens when it is good for gatekeepers. Technological progress usually is. Political progress is usually not. And so technological progress outpaces political progress. Interestingly, when their interests collide, technological progress is victorious. The Luddites lose their fight against the loom, and writers will lose their fight against artificial intelligence. One brother murders the other. We increase our mastery of nature, but our nature has kept mastery of us.

This takes us back to the Hebrew Bible’s claim that all people are made in the image of God. God delegated his power to rule creation to the people. The fall shows how we abdicate our role. Instead of ruling creation, a creature rules us¹⁴. We give in to the serpent’s frame, supposing God is not trustworthy. We try to become like God. We become gatekeepers managing an external contender. Genesis goes on to show how each generation makes the same mistake. The first is particularly tragic. God shows favor to Cain’s brother, Abel. Cain becomes angry. God approaches Cain, with a challenge, or possibly, a word of encouragement, one we should heed.

“It desires to have you, but you must rule over it.”

Footnotes