Barrel Strength

You can do yourself an enormous favour. Read Matt Ridley’s “The Rational Optimist”. Here is meat and potatoes for your mind, with a fine wine to wash it down. Ridley is the British science writer, author of such illuminating works as Genome and The Origins of Virtue, among others. This time he has gone well beyond his previous range, to great success.

This books achieves two things:

1. It looks athe entire history of our species from wandering bands on the plains of Africa until now as the progressive expansion of trade, as the cause of specialization of production, the elaboration of virtue, the improvement of the species, and the growth of wealth, and

2. a complete debunking of the constant pessimism that pervades society at the moment, and which has pervaded society since conversation was first recorded, according to Ridley: cancer, pesticides, AIDS, global warming, global cooling, genomic engineering, global famine, nuclear war: the list goes on and on of fashionable twaddle about inevitable catastrophes unless we de-industrialize, go back tothe land, and integrate ourselves with nature: the kind of stuff Prince Charles goes on about; the kind of society we existed in after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, called the Dark Ages.

I canot resist his  quote from John Stuart Mill, which prefaces his chapter “Turning Points: Pessimism after 1900″:

I have observed that not the man who hopes when others despair, but the man who despairs when others hope, is admired by a large class of persons as a sage.

David Suzuki? Al Gore? Paul Ehrlich? Thomas Malthus?

Though I enjoyed his attack on the doomsayers at the end of the book, it is grounded in an interesting take on human social evolution, the core of his argument.

Ridley argues that changing habits, generation by generation, were made possible by exchange,

“the swapping of things and services between individuals. This gave the Species an external, collective intelligence far greater than anything it could hold in its admittedly capacious brain….In this way exchange enouraged specialization, which further increased the number of different habits the species could have, while shrinking the number of things each individual knew how to make.Consumption could grow more diversified, while production could grow more specialized.”

He sees farming, and the burning of fossil fuels especialy, as the further release of energy for the benefit of mankind. His excoriation of starving the poor to grow ”green” fuels rivals anything Jonathan Swift could have written about fashionable nonsense.

Ridley’s book is based on very extensive reading of everything important: Adam Smith, Hayek, information theorists, anthropologists, evolutionary biologists, historians, and economists. His vast erudition is painlessly laid out in a compelling narrative.

Buy this book. Read it. Then buy ten copies and give it to anyone, including leftists especially, who might possibly read it. It will comfirm and strengthen you in all your beliefs that things are in fact improving (Islam notwithstanding) and that the doomists are a tired and broken record, perpetually wrong, whose only contribution is bleating and obstruction.

This is a great work and deserves the broadest possible readership.