Last November the old man’s weekly news magazine, The Economist, published a categorized list of books published in 2010. I made a short selection from brief descriptions and got one novel and two non-fiction books from my public library. The novel did not live up to its hype and I gave it but a brief scan.
The first non-fiction book I chose is a tome of some 650 pages called Why the West Rules—For Now, by Ian Morris, a young history professor at Stanford University in California, who was educated in England as an archaeologist and historian. Unfortunately I was allowed only a two-week non renewable loan. The second was a more manageable 430 odd pages on a three-week loan I was able to renew, called The Rational Optimist, by Matt Ridley.
There is little correlation between the two but they both deal with our world and our human condition in the present century. Morris traces that development from our ape-like beginnings in various parts of Africa to our as yet unknown but perhaps radically mutated bio-genetic, cloistered, or insect-like future. So does Ridley, though more succinctly and in a way to support his purposes. Both authors, perhaps coincidentally, also seem to consider the next one hundred years a kind of tipping point in that development.
The Morris book is a careful and serious study, written by a scholar but for easily absorbed public consumption. Morris has no obvious axe to grind except to add credit to his record as a scholar and philosopher. To develop his thesis, Morris reviews the several beginnings of our species in Central Africa the way H. G. Wells did in his early 20th century work, The Outline of History. He then concentrates on the differences that developed between the branches that evolved in the East, being China and South-east Asia on the one hand, and the West, being Eurasia on the other. He details the story of and the causes for different rates of social development through the long eras and describes the race between East and West currently continuing between China and America. In spite of periodic so-called scientific theories to the contrary, Morris considers people all over are basically the same. Differences in rates of social development often depend on geography and available resources.
History, he says, is “a single grand and relentless process of adaptations to the world that always generate new problems that call for further adaptations. Throughout this book I have called this process the paradox of development: rising social development creates the very forces that undermine it."
Personally, perhaps because of the somewhat transient nature of my background, I have generally looked for some kind of stability, though it has been elusive. Since I more or less gave up on my individual stab at upward mobility in the mid-1960s, I have attempted to demonstrate that “small is beautiful”, that there are limits to growth, that enough is enough and that local community self-sufficiency is possible. Readers may well say I was trying to show that a pipe dream was reality! History says such readers would be right.
As Morris says at page 560 of his book, “Societies rarely—perhaps never—simply get stuck at a ceiling and stagnate, their social development unchanging for centuries. Rather, if they do not figure out how to smash the ceiling, their problems spiral out of control. Some or all of what I have called the five horsemen of the apocalypse break loose, and famine, disease, migration, and state collapse—particularly if they coincide with an episode of climate change—will drive development down, sometimes for centuries, even into a dark age."
Though my dream of stability and order would have it otherwise, observations even during my lifetime indicate he is right. Change and chaos seem to be the only order, speeding up rapidly. In my June 2010 issue of The Old Man’s Post, as these books were still at pre-publication stage, I wrote about current scientific advances, saying, “I have no wish to be known as a Luddite opposed to all scientific innovation. The gods know that the wonders of technology have made it possible for me to enjoy in old age the challenges of continued learning, frustrations and all. … And yet I continue to believe that every “improvement”, each new tool or gadget to make our lives easier, more interesting, faster or better, carries with it the seeds of our own destruction. … Every time we take a bite from Eden’s tree of the knowledge of good and evil, humanity seems to look only at the “good” part without considering the “evil” consequences that will likely follow.” It boils down to trial and error—the same process Morris calls “the paradox of development” mentioned above.
The Morris book provides a great deal of fascinating and sometimes surprising history as well as amusing fictional scenarios. The future of the West’s race with the East does not look promising. As most futurists tend to do, he suggests there is still opportunity to escape the ravages of the “five horsemen of the apocalypse” to a deadline, which according to his cleverly reasoned “social development index”, is the year CE2103. He thinks this whole century is a race between what he calls “Nightfall” and “Singularity” and for the old man the prospect for either eventuality is equally frightening.
I will not spend much time on Matt Ridley’s book, The Rational Optimist. This writer is by nature an upwardly mobile positive thinker and doer. He frankly discloses his purpose in the book is to make optimists of us all. Through briefer but carefully selected bits of history of both East and West, Ridley acknowledges that all the wars, the greed, the climate changes and human nature will continue. In the meantime, though, he makes the case for the argument that in spite of all the turmoil, evil, loss of life, failed civilizations and natural disasters, the human condition has been steadily improving since our species emerged from the swamp.
Much of that improvement, he claims, came about with discovery and use of fossil fuels from coal, oil, and gas, and he makes no apology for that, obviously proud of his heritage as the scion of a mine owning family. He blasts the policy of encouraging bio-fuel development and there I heartily agree with him. He says the whole expensive acid rain treaty to save the lakes of Canada and the U.S. was a hoax and supports it with statistics and government reports. And he proudly claims that much of the improvement in the human condition came about with the increasing concentration of people in urban centres, a claim that runs irritatingly against my grain.
He argues at page 188 of his book, “Trade draws people to cities and swells the slums. Is this not a bad thing? No. Satanic the mills of the industrial revolution may have looked to romantic poets, but they were also beacons of opportunity to young people facing the squalor and crowding of a country cottage on too small a plot of land. As Ford Maddox Ford celebrated in his Edwardian novel, The Soul of London, the city may have seemed dirty and squalid to the rich but it was seen by the working class as a place of liberation and enterprise. Ask a modern Indian woman why she wants to leave her rural village for a Mumbai slum. Because the city, for all its dangers and squalor, represents opportunity, the chance to escape from the village of her birth, where there is drudgery without wages, suffocating family control and where work happens in the merciless heat of the sun or the drenching downpour of the monsoon. Just as Henry Ford said he was driven to invent the gasoline buggy to escape the ‘crushing boredom of life in a Midwest farm’, so, says Suketa Mehta, “for the young person in an Indian village, the call of Mumbai isn’t just about money, it’s also about freedom.’"
Ridley says the world will be a better place in 2100 than it is today and the twenty-first century will be a magnificent time to be alive. Science and technology made possible by the continued use of fossil fuels will make things still better, he thinks. “Dare to be an optimist” he urges us. He is a naturally good salesman and many readers will accept his arguments but the old man is still “from Missouri".
Both books are a fascinating read.
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