Skip to main content

The Rational Optimist – Matt Ridley ****

I have a real problem reviewing a book like this. I’m the sort of person who can listen to a speech by practically any non-extremist politician and think ‘Yes, that makes sense.’ I am quite easily swayed by political argument, and in essence, The Rational Optimist isn’t a science book at all, it is a political polemic that happens to be by a science writer. Even so, it’s interesting enough that I feel it is worth covering here.
The majority of Ridley’s book is pointing out that we really have never had it so good. And it’s a very convincing argument indeed. He points out that those people who look back to pre-industrialization with a fake rosy glow of a time when we lived happy lives, better in tune with nature is just rubbish. The fact is, most people scraped a living and had short (at least on average), nasty lives. Ah, someone is bound to pipe up, that’s because agriculture itself was one technology too many. People were better fed and happier when they were hunter gatherer’s.
Ridley pops this bubble very effectively too. It’s true that hunter gatherers were usually much better fed than subsistence farmers. The problem is that hunter gatherers still suffered from all the untreated illnesses. And they needed a phenomenal amount of space per person. To achieve this, they were in a constant state of war with practically everyone else in sight. Most of them would not make old age even if they survived childhood diseases because of being murdered. (In fact it’s true of all our ‘idyllic’ past – homicide rates were much higher than now.)
We have a grim picture of people being forced into dark satanic slums to feed the industrial machine, but as Ridley also points out, most people moved to the slums because they were better than their living conditions in the country. It was horrible, it was rubbish, but it was better rubbish, and a step on the ladder.
The theme throughout the book is one of rational optimism. He argues than many – most? – thinkers through the ages have been pessimists with disaster always around the corner. For thousands of years, the popular stance has been, ‘Yes, it’s okay now, but soon it will all go wrong.’ Ridley suggests that the reason it doesn’t go wrong is that we invent ourselves out of the problem. The reason we won’t run out of energy or food, for example, is we will find ways around it. And he’s right, despite all the gloom and woe-mongers, on the whole we do.
This is not a Panglossian treatise suggesting we have the best of all possible worlds – Ridley accepts we’ve a long way to go – but simply that we have achieved a much better general standard than our forebears, and there is every chance we will continue to do so. The big driving factor, he suggests, is the interbreeding of ideas, fuelled by trade. As long as you try to do everything yourself, you can never progress very far. Self-sufficiency is a dead end. Try making an iPad out of twigs from your allotment. You need to be able to trade with others, to develop specialists and so on to be able to invent your way out of disasters.
Ridley takes on the big problems of Africa and climate change, not necessarily offering total solutions, but pointing out some of the changes that are needed if we are to address these issues more constructively. He has a media image of being a climate change denier. This isn’t quite fair – he does downplay the impact, but also believes we are much better at coping with slow change – which climate change is – than we are generally given credit for. The final section of the book, which attempts a bit of futurology is very weak in comparison with the rest and doesn’t add a lot to the rest.
Overall, then, the message of the book is encouraging and I’m all in favour of it. At times the way Ridley gets that message across is tedious with statistic after statistic being hurled at us in a barrage, but perhaps he feels he needs to do this, so strong is the underlying ethos that the modern world is terrible, rather than the best we’ve achieved to date.
I confess I very much liked what I read. I can’t give this the full five stars as I don’t see why it is being regarded as a popular science book – but it should be required reading for environmentalists, politicians and professional doom mongers.

Paperback:  

Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader.  We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard.  This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The AI Paradox - Virginia Dignum ****

This is a really important book in the way that Virginia Dignum highlights various ways we can misunderstand AI and its abilities using a series of paradoxes. However, I need to say up front that I'm giving it four stars for the ideas: unfortunately the writing is not great. It reads more like a government report than anything vaguely readable - it really should have co-authored with a professional writer to make it accessible. Even so, I'm recommending it: like some government reports it's significant enough to make it necessary to wade through the bureaucrat speak. Why paradoxes? Dignum identifies two ways we can think about paradoxes (oddly I wrote about paradoxes recently , but with three definitions): a logical paradox such as 'this statement is false', or a paradoxical truth such as 'less is more' - the second of which seems a better to fit to the use here.  We are then presented with eight paradoxes, each of which gives some insights into aspects of t...
Post a Comment
Read more

Einstein's Fridge - Paul Sen ****

In Einstein's Fridge (interesting factoid: this is at least the third popular science book to be named after Einstein's not particularly exciting refrigerator), Paul Sen has taken on a scary challenge. As Jim Al-Khalili made clear in his excellent The World According to Physics , our physical understanding of reality rests on three pillars: relativity, quantum theory and thermodynamics. But there is no doubt that the third of these, the topic of Sen's book, is a hard sell. While it's true that these are the three pillars of physics, from the point of view of making interesting popular science, the first two might be considered pillars of gold and platinum, while the third is a pillar of salt. Relativity and quantum theory are very much of the twentieth century. They are exciting and sometimes downright weird and wonderful. Thermodynamics, by contrast, has a very Victorian feel and, well, is uninspiring. Luckily, though, thermodynamics is important enough, lying behind ...
Post a Comment
Read more