On Reading “The Rational Optimist” by Matt Ridley

I’m going to attempt a review of Matt Ridley’s book, and try to work my way towards a new way of looking at the future. 

What has happened to me is that just as I had found a story about the current situation of the world that worked – a scenario in which all the pieces fit and made sense – I have had to fundamentally question the whole edifice. It was a pessimistic prognosis based on a human population crash. Some of its supports began to give way as I worked through Steven Pinker’s “The Better Angels of our Nature”. Here was an academic I absolutely admire showing quite clearly that throughout the world, despite the world wars, the genocides, the overpopulation, the suicide bombers,  we are living in the least violent society in human history.  This has undermined one of my basic analogies with the natural world: that overpopulation will inevitably lead to increased violence. One of the most important engines for the reduction of violence has been the growth of good government. I’ll come back to this point later because it tends to contradict Ridley’s conclusions.

A few years ago I got about half way through Bjorn Lomborg’s “The Sceptical Environmentalist”. Even then I had to admit that he was right about some things, but it became clear as I ploughed on through his relentless glorification of “progress” that even if he was right, the sort of world he looked forward to – one of constantly increasing prosperity for all – was not one I would want to live in. He seemed to have little knowledge of evolutionary cycles in the natural world, and could see nothing that could not be improved by human effort.

Ridley’s message is much the same; even his title has an echo of Lomborg. He gives a brief complimentary nod to the book, and uses many of the same statistics. However, at least for me, there are major differences. My way of looking at the world is conditioned by 40 years of immersion in the world of “Green” politics, and Ridley could easily be seen as one of the enemy – one of the massed ranks of the proponents of “business as usual”. He is a passionate exponent of the free market, which on the face of it puts him in the same camp as Thatcher, Reagan, Cheney, Hayek et al. Yet astonishingly his concluding chapter could almost have come from the Occupy movement.

Green politics is about the conservation of the natural world, and whereas the “Environmentalist” in the title of Lomborg’s book is not a type we would recognize, Ridley’s environmental credentials are pretty good. He cares passionately about the preservation of species and habitats. In his view it is the increased use of fossil fuel which has enabled us to satisfy our needs for food and raw materials from a decreasing area of land. If we try to supply our current energy needs from sustainable sources we would have to use most of the land currently used for food production, and that would leave nothing for species preservation. Having read David McKay’s “Sustainable Energy without the Hot Air” I am convinced that there is not enough land on the planet to sustain anything like our present energy use without fossil fuels. One of the big fault lines between Ridley & co and the Green movement is the Green belief that we can all live well on very much less energy.

Another big fault line is climate change. Ridley is unusual amongst the “anti-Greens” in that he does not query the overwhelming scientific evidence of man-made climate change. He refuses to get involved in that argument. Where he differs from the Greens is his belief that the effects of it have been much exaggerated, but that even the worst case scenario would still be better than a return to low energy self-sufficiency. 

I began my attachment to green politics with the self-sufficiency movement in the 70s; in particular with Schumacher’s “Small is Beautiful”.  I still admire the character type of the self-sufficient. I would have been a good frontiersman myself – able to turn my hand to all manner of skills to earn a living. However, the more I read about the way human society has developed the more clear it is that Ridley is absolutely right that throughout history and in every country, whenever the rural self-sufficient peasantry have been offered the choice they have always preferred life as wage slaves in the city slums to life scraping a living on the land. 

I still cherish a romantic notion of the self-sufficient life, but accept that it is not something that could or should become one of our social goals.  I also still believe that the “Tipping Point” scenario is very probable, but accept that the Green movement have cried wolf far too often.  We can passionately believe that our greed will lead to a crisis, but must remain agnostic when it comes to predicting the crisis point and what form it will take. 

I remember once writing a piece in which I tried to show that the whole idea of Trade was a nonsense.  I certainly don’t believe that now; indeed I think Ridley’s central premise is right: that unique amongst the animals, humans prosper by the division of labour and the trading of their skills.  What I have learnt about the natural world and evolution over the last 10 years has tended to show that differences between humans and animals are far less than we humans had thought, and that research was continually closing the gap. (Ridley himself has written 4 books on that theme). Here though, the research seems to show that bartering (giving up something you like in order to obtain something you like even more) is uniquely human.  One experiment shows that human infants are much more likely to share and swap food items than infant Oran Utans, and another that Chimpanzees have no notion of the value of bartering. 

It is this unique human characteristic which is central to Ridley’s argument. Unlike other economic growth enthusiasts (and most of the general public) Ridley is fully versed in the science of evolution. He understands how evolution works, and makes a clear distinction between genetic and cultural evolution. His claim is that we evolve culturally by acquiring the freedom to trade and barter. We regress when that process is impeded whether by dogma, tyranny, overpopulation or bad government. One of the many fascinating insights into history that Ridley presents is the example of countries in Asia in the eighteenth century which had experienced rapid population growth as a result of the development of technology and trade, but had run into a Malthusian trap and had been forced to retreat to more self-sufficiency. With surplus population, human labour becomes cheap and technology expensive. Japan evidently abandoned the plough and even the gun in favour of the spade and the sword. That this did not happen in Europe is largely down to the opening up of America and the use of coal.

Another important pillar in Ridley’s argument is the inexhaustibility of knowledge. He begins chapter 8 with a quotation from Thomas Jefferson:

“He who receives an idea from me receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine receives light without darkening mine.”  I have always loved efficient technology; as a woodworker I toyed with but rejected the idea that hand work is better than machine work.  Ever since I discovered  computers in the 90s I have been an enthusiastic gadget freak, and am still delighted that I can read this book on my phone. The phone is sitting in its stand on my desk and I am referring to my notes on it now. There is no Malthusian trap in the growth of knowledge, and to me one of the triumphs of our age is the rapid advance of knowledge about ourselves. We now know how we came into being, we understand much of ecology, we have deciphered our genetic code, and we are well on the way to understanding how our brains work. The irony is that we also understand clearly why it is so hard for most of us to take this knowledge on board. We know why many people behave in a highly irrational manner; why emotion and prejudice count for more than facts.

Unlike, it seems to me, most American conservatives Ridley is a passionate believer in the rational, and in line with Pinker in his belief that thieves, tyrants and bigots will always be with us and will always act against the tide of human betterment. He has no time for “chiefs, priests, thieves, financiers and consultants”! He sees the future in the bottom-up sharing of information. Large corporations, political parties and government bureaucracies will wither away and herald the “Catallaxy”, Hayek’s word for spontaneous order created by exchange and specialisation. He sees this in the “dot communism” of the web, where bartering takes place without the use of “real” money. This is very much in line with the philosophy of the Occupy movement and campaigning organizations like Avaaz which mobilise public support against all kinds of oppressive regimes and corporate greed.

So, there is much to agree with, BUT a profoundly different idea of what constitutes an attractive future.  

He is an enthusiastic exponent of economic growth and can see no benefit in a sustainable society. This is the familiar argument of most of the “business as usual” proponents, and climate change deniers. Economic growth, fuelled by the rapid exploitation of fossil fuels, is the only way to enable us all to live in reasonable comfort. The combination of the “demographic transition” – the process by which birth rates stabilise and decline – and the knowledge explosion will eventually enable us all to live decent lives within our means.

Ridley sees nothing wrong with the mountains of cheap products being produced in China and thrown away by us. He praises Walmart for bringing cheap goodies to the workers. Despite his views on the bottom-up society he still sees GDP as a measure of human prosperity and economic growth as a desirable aim in itself. 

This is where I have to part company with him. I do not want ever increasing material wealth for myself and I certainly don’t want it for the mass of humanity. It seems to me there is much greater happiness to be had by living in harmony with nature rather than constantly “eating our future”.

It see a fundamental flaw in the argument of those who promote economic growth. I can see that it makes sense to use fossil fuel to create the framework of a better future – to use it as a capital resource to create the technologies of a non-fossil fuel future. Yet the idea that our kind of prosperity – material wealth - can go on increasing indefinitely doesn’t make sense to me. At some point in the future we have to get back in balance.

Ridley sees the eco-pessimists as being the mainstream, at least amongst the thoughtful. I see a vast majority promoting the idea of economic growth. Of course it could be that most of these are people who give little if any thought to the future, who think of the climate and population as being someone else’s problems. 

Matt Ridley bravely attempts a look into the future while admitting that most predictions say more about the time they were written than the time they are writing about. There are two aspects to futurology: we can try to predict what we think is probable and we can look to what we think is attractive. Ridley tries to look at how political decisions might be made in the future. I think this is the right approach but it seems to me that his notion of Catallaxy runs counter to the conclusions which Steven Pinker comes to when looking for the causes of the reduction in violence which the world now enjoys. It is, according to Pinker, honest and trustworthy institutions of law and order which are vital to a reduction of violence. It seems to me that in a world of “dot communism” there are too many openings for the parasites, ideologues and tyrants. 

Among those who understand evolution there is wide agreement that there is a serious mis-match between the ecological niche we evolved to fit and the way we actually live now. The brains and bodies we have inherited give us all the characteristics we need to survive and procreate in a society of small hunter-gatherer tribes, but leave us at the mercy of inappropriate instinctive behaviours in the post-agricultural industrial world. 

One of our deepest needs is to belong to the equivalent of a tribe, and one of the most difficult of these tribal groupings is that which opposes the political tribe of the left with that of the right. I have just watched a short film set in East Jerusalem which shows left-wing Israelis supporting Palestinians being evicted from their homes by right-wing Israelis. This situation is a tragedy for the whole region.  In its potential to cause massive suffering this division is rivalled only by opposing religions.

Although fiercely critical of the “loony left” and what I call “hippie bollocks” I have nevertheless always seen myself as belonging to the tribe of the left and in opposition to the tribe of the right.  Does the fact that I am here praising a writer who appears to belong squarely to the other side mean I am moving rightwards – becoming more conservative with age? 

ABSOLUTELY NOT. Get me going on our class-ridden education system and I sound like a raving communist! What it means, I think, is that I am moving towards the breaking up of these two great tribes. If we are to come to terms with the potentially catastrophic situation we find ourselves in we HAVE to stop thinking in terms of “us and them”. If Lomborg and Ridley and the other proponents of an abundant future are saying things which are factually correct then we should not dismiss them with phrases like “well they would say that wouldn’t they?” 

A joke I cherish is “Just because I’m paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get me”, and just because some of the loony right have a massive vested interest in “business as usual” doesn’t mean that everything they say is wrong.