After Cataracts: 20/15 vision

The coda to this story is the second operation a week later.

Now I knew what to expect I was really looking forward to it. Everything went smoothly as before until I got back to Hannah's house in the early evening. While the dressing was on I had no trouble seeing everything with my one treated eye which had now settled down and felt completely normal.

Then at 7 I had to take the dressing off to do the first lot of drops. It was a nasty shock. I was seeing double and the left eye was clouded.

It was Megan, my grand-daughter's fifteenth birthday and Hannah had planned a meal out in Pieminister - a down-to-earth restaurant in Stokes Croft specialising in pies. It was a difficult evening in a noisy environment feeling quite anxious about the operation. Still, the food was good and I managed to talk to Danny, Megan's dad.

When we got back I took the dressing off again and POW - there was the world in high definition 3D as clear as a bell. We had a follow up appointment at Optical Express at 8.30 next morning. We had to wait a few minutes for Guy the optometrist who lives in Cardiff and had got delayed in traffic held up by the dreadful weather. He did the standard eye tests and announced that I had 20/15 vision in both eyes - one better than the benchmark 20/20 vision.

Ever since then I've eagerly drinking in all the detail in my surroundings - even in near constant rain, everything looked great, and when some patches of sunlight lit up parts of the Usk valley on the way home I was enraptured.

How beautiful the world is. Why do we have to mess it up so much?

Cataract update

At least with private medicine you don't have to wait.
Oh yes? Think again.  Thelma did the phone calls,  first contacting the private hospital outside Carmarthen in mid December. Then the surgeon went on holiday and they couldn't find my notes. Eventually in the first week of January we got some sense out of them. "Ah yes Mr. Turner, Mr. Jones has a spot free in mid February. He's very popular you know."

Clearly not only was the NHS in a bad state in Wales but there had been a knock on effect on the private providers. Feeling a bit like a traitor to my adopted country I started looking for clinics in England and a google search threw up Optical Express in Bristol. As I was looking at their details a pop-up screen appeared: "How can I help you?" Within twenty minutes of typed exchanges I had a rough price and understood their way of working which necessitated a free consultation as the first step.
"OK, I'll go for that, when can you see me?"
I waited about half a minute for the reply
"We have a space tomorrow"
"Thel - can we go to Bristol tomorrow?" "Yes"
"Yes, we'll be there."
They even had a surgery spot available four days later. The consultation was very thorough, and they offered to do both eyes, one a week after the other, for £3000. This was a saving of £1000 on the individual eye cost and cheaper than most I had looked at so I agreed. However, when they found I was taking flomax tablets to mitigate the effects of an enlarged prostate they said I would have stop taking them now and wait for 2 weeks before they could do the first operation.

To help the time pass I worked away at the panelling, fitted desk and fitted bookcase I was making for our small study room. It was hard going trying to read measurements with the tiny strip of relatively clear vision I could get at the very top of my spectacles. I kept away from other people as much as possible to reduce the risk of getting a cold. Two days before the op I had to start with a regime of eye drops to keep the eye as healthy as possible. I had a sore throat which worried me.

At last the day before the op arrived. The sore throat was still there but no signs of a cold so we set off in the afternoon to stay at Hannah's place for two nights. The first operation was at 9.30 in the morning and we got there far too early. It was a cold day and the clinic was barely warm enough as I waited between a series of tests and brief chats with the optometrist, the surgeon, the nurse and the anaesthetist. At least the sore throat seemed to have gone.

Just get me that pre-op tranquilizer please! At last I was on the trolley with a drip in my arm and all became peaceful and still. Anaesthetic drops were put in my eye and a cover was put over me and stuck to the face. I felt hands moving around my face, various dim lights, a buzzing noise and something wet tricking down my face. After about ten minutes the cover was stripped off and a dressing applied. I was taken back to the chair I had been sitting in a few minutes before and offered a cup of tea and a biscuit, both of which were very welcome.

Somewhat unsteadily I walked with Thelma back to the car and when we got to Hannah's took a painkiller and went to bed.

I had my first glimpse of the new world when the dressing was taken off briefly to apply eye drops later that afternoon.  There in front of me was Hannah's little painted dresser looking indescribably beautiful - clear rich colours, pale blue and red, and fine detail; brass handles which shone - an image which I knew would stay with me. Then the dressing went back and I had to struggle through the evening with just the one bad eye.

I went to bed early and managed to sleep until a reasonable hour when I finally got to the pay-off moment - the dressing came off and stayed off.

We are warned that it usually takes a few days for the eye to adjust so I was not expecting the astonishing vista which was laid out before me. It was as if what I was looking at was an old painting which had just been cleaned. All the dirty varnish had been removed and there was the original in all its sparkling colours - colours so rich and vibrant that I could not believe I had seen them like this before. Houses, ordinary streets, small back gardens, rain, dark clouds, black wet streets - they all looked wonderful.

As we were driving home I experimented with closing one eye and then the other. By some extraordinary bit of brain magic the left eye, which was almost completely clouded, could provide a semblance of stereoscopic vision when both eyes were open, and the clouding was just a faint shadow. I kept gazing round in wonder - a seagull flying overhead, distant hills, people's faces inside cars.

The only downside was that everyone, including me, looked older; with every wrinkle and blemish clearly visible.

The Year of the Cataracts

A year of cataracts! I sounds like a sort of apocalyptic weather forecast.

If all goes well it will soon be over, but both metaphorically and actually I will see things with different eyes. I hope I will look back on this period as one of learning. The steady decline in my hearing which had been slowly narrowing my world has, in the last year, been joined by a rapid decline in vision and a much more dramatic reduction in the activities available to me. The first to go was bird-watching.  I would catch a glimpse of an interesting looking shape in the sky but it would disappear as soon as I moved to focus on it. By the time my camera reached its first birthday I could no longer see the screen well enough to use it.

The next to go was driving. I had a last trip in the camper in September but I could not read the road signs so kept to roads I knew well.

The loss I felt most keenly was the printed page. Newspapers were the first casualties, but I managed to plough through a book in October before abandoning print. I could still read screens, so kept my brain active with the internet,  ebooks and online news.

Then in November I began to record my "cataract blog". I will update it and sign off after the operations.

24 November 2013

It is now just over a year since I had my eyes tested and got new distance glasses. The optician did not diagnose cataract. It was not until February and my first trial trip in the camper that I became aware of a mistiness while driving. I began to suspect something else was wrong and did some internet research. Cataract seemed to fit and Mark the doctor confirmed it on the 12th of April this year. "No need to do anything now" he said."For most people it takes a long time to become a problem, but in some it develops quite quickly."

I soldiered on, but I was becoming more and more aware of a problem and came to the concusion that I was one of the unlucky ones. In late May I saw the optician and began the long process of getting treatment on the NHS. The first stage is an appointment to see a specialist, and there is a 4 month waiting list for this.

While I was waiting, I saw the ENT specialist who confirmed that there was nothing more they could do for my deafness, but he did agree to write to the Opthalmology department to confirm that I had severe hearing loss.

By September it was obvious that I could not continue driving, and I was having increasing difficulty reading normal size type. I could no longer watch birds, or take photographs. Life was closing in.

I saw the specialist on the 7th of October. The nurse who tested my sight was surprised how good it was, but the specialist realised that because the cataract on my right eye covered the centre of the eye, in bright light my vision was seriously impaired. She fully understood about how much sight affects the ability of deaf people to communicate and made a case for priority treatment.

I was now at day one on a 6 month waiting list - unless I could get a cancellation or was given priority.

A few weeks later I went to have the eyes measured for their new plastic lenses. I had decided that if I didn't get a better date than April, I would have to go private.  I stressed to the technician that I was really worried that if I could not lipread I would not be able to communicate, and if I could not read then all forms of entertainment and information would be closed to me. She made sure I was on tahe list of people who could be called at short notice if they get any cancellations, and said she would ring admissions and see what was happening.

Good news - I'm scheduled for December!

Bad news - they are running two months late.

That meant worst case was late Feb, I decided I could cope with that and felt a great relief. Why, I asked myself, was I so averse to going private? I had the money - about £2000. Some of it was ideological - the typical leftie dislike of private medicine, but I didn't feel too strongly about that. Then I realised that mjy bad experience with private hearing aid providers was the main reason.

Last week I did my last woodworking job for money - the end of a long run of difficult repair jobs for the Slaters. From now until the op I would only do work for myself so that if I made a mistake the customer wouldn't suffer.

Some days I see really badly and start thinking again about booking a private appointment, but I'm actually coping quite well at present because I am spending a lot of time writing my book and really enjoying it.  I decided that this was partly as a result of other aspects of my life becoming so restricted. When I had better hearing and much better sight there were so many things I could do that I never felt like sitting down for long enough to write seriously.

I'm fairly sure that one of the reasons for my good frame of mind at present is that Mark has prescribed a low-dose anti-depressant as a treatment for my stomach ache - which he calls Irritable Bowel Syndrome, a term which covers all sorts of different intractible problems. I'm not entirely sure it has seen off the IBS, but I do seem to be more optimistic and calm than I used to be. This may be because I am getting more sleep. I now find I can go back to sleep at the time when I would normally have been leaping out of bed - well not leaping exactly, more like levering myself out of bed.

So, I have made this resolution: I am going to wait whatever happens. If I can no longer see my screens to read and write I will spend more time just being - thinking, walking, cycling, doing exercises. I can continue writing by dictation. It will be very good for me to learn how to exist without constant information input.

8 December

I've stopped writing the book. Most of the anomalies and omissions have been dealt with and it's long enough. At first I felt elated - "I've finished a book!" but the next day depression set in. It was all rubbish and would make me look silly. I had a couple of bad days trying to read the computer screen.

Last week Thelma rang the admissions people and they said it had been postponed and would not now happen before March.

I decided to go private.

All this stuff about "just being" is all very well on a good day, but we've both had colds for a fortnight, and I'm feeling a great sense of anti-climax now that so much of my time is no longer spent writing.

29 December

I get waves of panic when there is a step change. Yesterday was bad - total blur-out in the right eye and left not much better. For the first time I struggled to read the white on black type on my phone. Then I remembered I could increase the font size again and it was better. Today I couldn't read my diagrams for the next bit or work on the panelling - something I could do 2 weeks ago.

What happens if I can't read at all before I can get the operation done? Even if I still can, for a few days afterwards I will be unable to read.

New strategy: even with three quarters of my hearing gone,  I can still hear after a fashion. And perhaps if I persevere with my bluetooth headphones I will be able to watch videos and even perhaps listen to music.

Help came from an unlikely quarter - my much derided laptop is now gaining in my estimation. I tried a few film trailers but the sound was too quiet. Then I realised I hadn't turned up the volume on the headphones themselves. Try this music application. It is an internet radio app and is asking me to suggest an artist, and it will find other similar music. I type in "Sting" and here is Joan Armitrading singing loud and clear. I try Massive Attack and get one of theirs I'd not heard. Really good sound!

19 Jan 2013

I'm now counting down the days. Two weeks ago we finally managed to get some sense out of the private hospital near Carmarthen, but the best they could offer was mid February. I decided to give up on Wales and look to the nearest bit of England. Google soon came up with Optical Express in Bristol, and as I was typing in details to get an appointment a "live chat" option popped up. Within about 20 minutes I had got a price guide and an indication of availability, and a few minutes later had booked an appointment for the next day!

Thelma and I did the familiar trip to Bristol. The clinic was in the new Carbot Centre so for the first time we parked in the multi-storey linked to the shopping centre by an overhead walkway.

The appointment took several hours. At the end of it I was offered one eye for just under 2k but both for 3, and the promise that the second could be done a week after the first. They had put some strong drops in my eyes so that they could see through the cataracts better, and when I came out of the dark room into the main reception hall of the building I was amazed by the strong colours and the light. This altered perception took the edge off my disappointment when it transpired I would have to stop taking my prostate drug "Flomaxtra" for 2 weeks before the first op.

I signed up for 5 appointments beginning on the 23rd, and paid a deposit of £500.

Sitting in the car on the way back I was thrilled by the amount I could see. I could even read my phone screen without reversing the colours. What if the drops had made a lasting improvement? I certainly didn't mind a long wait with this level of sight.

The next day the effect was still there, but on the third day the accustomed mix of gloom and glare returned, seeming to be worse than ever. Since then I've struggled on with the panelling job in the study. It's getting very hard to read a tape now and I've had to give up using Sketchup to model the difficult bits - back to trial and error.

The man who did the eye tests said that the modern cataract operation came about because during the war surgeons had operated on the eyes of air crews injured by shards of perspex from shattered aircraft windows. They noticed that the eyes did not react to bits of perspex embedded in them. From that came the plastic lens and more recently the technique of using ultrasound to remove the clouded natural lens.

I've spent a lot of time thinking about what sort of technology would be available in a sustainable society, and it seems to me that this is a perfect example of a technology which does not depend on fossil fuel - it is simple the result of an increase in knowledge. How much of this knowledge would we have now if we had not exploited fossil fuel? If for example human society had developed with a powerful taboo on using something which cannot be replaced, would we have seen the exponential growth in knowledge which we have seen in the last 100 years or so? It seems one of our distant ancestors lived for thousands of years with the same stone-chipping technology. It seems probable that our brains have changed sufficiently in the last 2 thousand years to prevent this happening in the future.

Body Shock

I'm in shock. I am not who I thought I was. For all my adult life I have thought of myself as a reasonably tall man - certainly not short. I was 5ft 10 or 178 cm. 

Now I'm a different person. This is how it happened:

A few days ago Hannah lent me the "The Fast Diet" by Michael Moseley based on a Horizon programme which I had watched with interest last year. I was convinced fasting was not for me. I have a rapid metabolism and need to eat regularly to avoid low blood sugar and exhaustion. Well, perhaps not. A much greater problem for me is nervous stomach ache. This can be triggered by ill fitting trousers or bad posture and again lasts for hours.Because it's mainly in my head it's very resistant to drug treatments.

There are probably many reasons why I have been so troublesome lately, but if I could get trousers to fit at least I could remove one of the most potent triggers. The root cause is that my waist is larger than my hips, but since I'm not overweight I've preferred to get my trousers altered until they fit exactly round my hips. It's not really working though, and I've never heard of anyone else having this problem, so it's time for drastic action - Intermittent Fasting as recommended by Michael M. 

I'm convinced by the science because it's based on the dietary conditions we evolved to cope with: an irregular supply of fibrous plant food with seeds, fruit and occasional meat. The new discovery is that the irregularity is also important to us: our bodies are programmed to adapt to period without food, and switch to, as Moseley puts it,  "repair mode".

Surely a day with very little food could not be any worse than a day of belly ache? I decided to try it but first I had to do the metrics - weight, height, waist circumference and Body Mass Index. 

I knew my height and my smart scales did the BMI calculation - 22.5, comfortably withing the healthy area. I also thought I knew my waist size - 36" or 91.5 cm . Dear Micahel however points out that the waist is where the naval is. When I measured here it turns out my waist size is 37.5"  or 95cm. Since it was a long time since I'd last checked my height I thought I'd better do this too.

This was the big shock. Shoes off I stood against a still unpainted door , Thelma lowered a set square until it rested on my head and made a mark on the door.

"Seventeen twenty? (I think in millimetres) That can't be right, do it again." There was no mistake. My height is 172 cm or 5ft 8". I'm two inches shorter than I have always believed. Surely I can't have shrunk that much? 

It's profoundly disturbing. Just thinking about it brings on the belly ache. The "Michelin Tyre" I knew about really, but I was reluctant to call it my waist.  Evidently the waist to height ration is a key indicator of health problems. Your waist should be less than half your height.  91 to 178 is not too bad, but 95 to 172 is decidedly unhealthy.

All this is on top of rapidly worsening cataracts, terrible hearing, enlarged prostate and keratosis!  Quite enough to indulge in a bout of depression, and I duly woke up feeling depressed. Writing it all down is good therapy: know your enemy and prepare to fight back. The cataracts will eventually be cured and I can restore my waist size. I'm used to being deaf, the prostatitis is under control and the keratosis manageable. 

Decent vision and comfortable trousers are quite enough to enable me to live a good life.  Perhaps today the postman will bring a message from the hospital which will start the clock ticking towards my cataract operation.      

Otis Redding and Frank Sinatra

I watched a recording of "Otis Redding Soul Ambasador" last night. It was just as formulaic as all the other nostalgic music programmes, but I found it very moving on all sorts of levels. Even with decent headphones, all recorded music sounds out of tune and distorted to me now, but because I knew these songs so well I could fill in the sound from memory, and seeing the fantastic excitement of his performances I wanted so much to turn the clock back and be there.

There was a lot of talk about the emotion of his songs, but nobody mentioned the timing. If you listen to his band you won't hear any great flights of musicianship; as one of them said, it's simple stuff, but it's so TIGHT. You couldn't put a cigarette paper between them as we used to say. Their sense of timing is perfect: they know to the micro-second exactly where each note should be in the bar, and they take their lead from the man at the front.I don't think there can have been anyone better at punching out lyrics with such rhythm AND meaning.

Of course Frank Sinatra was also famous for his timing, but the brief comparison they played between Otis and Sinatra both singing "Try a Little Tenderness" was quite mind-blowing. Here in a nutshell was the state of America in the early 60s. On the one hand is the raw, in-your-face energy of the poor black boy from the deep south, driven by the rhythms of West Africa - a community where singing, dancing and praising the lord go hand in hand. On the other is the smooth, sophisticated, reassuring, sentimental delivery of the sly gangster. If anyone asks me now why I loathe Sinatra and adore Redding I will simply point to this comparison.

I do admit that Sinatra was a consumate craftsman who will always be admired around the world for his skill. His are the values of white America in the 60s. They seldom heard black music and were genuinely afraid of the sheer masculinity of people like Otis.

I'm also very moved by the story of STAX records, the architypal black label where white musicians were were welcomed and greatly valued.The main thrust of the programme was something I was a very small part of. I was a little too young to be dancing in the cinema when "Rock around the Clock" hit Britain, but as soon as I heard Chuck Berry and Little Richard I knew that Bill Haley was not the real thing.

I went to Detroit as a student in the mid 60s, came back with some Motown records which had not been released here, joined a soul band and started playing this still very non-mainstream music. It was a revelation to the Stax crew that there were so many of us white kids so mad for their music.

Of course I felt, as the programme makers intended, proud that we had given these fine musicians an audience they couldn't find in colour-bar America, but in doing so we killed the thing we loved. (Paris, by the way, did the same for black American jazz musicians, though in giving them an audience they didn't harm the music.)

AS soon as R&B and Soul music hit the mainstream and the big bucks it lost its edge. Stax disintegrated in arguments about money. Louis Armstrong went on to become the architypal "Uncle Tom", but if you listen to his early 78s you get the same raw passion as the great Soul singers. Sammy Davis jnr even joined the Sinatra bunch. By the time I got to hear Little Richard live he was singing pop songs too.

Of course many great black American musicians went on to make wonderful pop, jazz, blues and soul music - Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, John Coltrane, Miles Davis to name but a few. I can't think of any now. That may be me getting too old, but I can't bear to listen to the MOBO awards now. It all seems so slick and commercialised - a reflection of the present-day culture of Black America perhaps. 

Was it such a tragedy that Otis died so young? It was news to me that he had not even quite finished "Dock of the Bay", his first and only chart success. The Stax guys thought this near perfect pop song was a sell-out. Would he have become another Stevie Wonder or yet another slick pop singer? Another thing I found moving was the bright flame still carried for him by his wife and daughter. His memory is unsullied by drugs, booze, womanizing, overweight and all the other pitfalls of the public life. He is simply Otis Redding the perfect soul singer.

Mountain lakes and the bucket list

Today I set out to find again a magical spot I discovered about 35 years ago and had not seen since.

I was then staying alone for a week in a static caravan at Ynyslas near Borth, owned by first wife Jan's brother Derek. In a conversation with a stranger in a pub I was told of a place called "Craig y Pistyll" (Waterfall crag) where I would see peregrines. So I set off to trek across the mountains to find it. The peregrines were absent but in a remote spot I found a mountain lake with a colony of black headed gulls breeding on an island. It drained to a ravine overlooked by two crags.

Last night I stayed at a little campsite outside Machynlleth and looking at the map saw that the lane I was on led to a path which, with some deviation, led to a lake above two crags called "Pistyll y Llyn". Allowing for a faulty memory this had to be the place. It looked like a fairly tough walk but I was determined. This was a clear candidate for the bucket list.  Here it is on the map:

As forecast, the weather today has been wonderful - the first real taste of spring, but it was cold when I set out (after the usual 6am breakfast) so I took some warm clothes. After half an hour I had to carry them for the rest of the day. It was a long hard climb with an old map and paths altered by 30 years of forestry. I trusted the contours more than the paths and at last reached the view I had been climbing for: "Llyn pen Rhaeadr" (lake above the waterfall - yes like the Eskimos and snow there are at least 2 words for waterfall in Welsh).

There were no gulls but 20 or 30 generations (of gulls) later that was no surprise. I told myself I would only go a little further to get a view of the crags but then it didn't seem too far to the lake itself so I yomped through a quarter of a mile of boggy tussock grass to get to the shore, where I immediately flushed some teal - fantastic - at least for me, and the teal didn't seem too bothered.

I sat on a tussock and ate most of my supermarket sandwich and wondered why it had taken me so long to get there. I didn't remember the trip being so arduous, yet on the map, the routes from the south seemed even longer. I studied the old creased map again and within seconds I saw it: much further south and clearly labelled "Llyn Craigypistyll". I had the wrong lake!

The bucket list was no shorter. And yet and yet - it was some years since I had last done such a walk and the weather was perfect - I laughed. It will be a good excuse for another trip to one of my favourite bits of the world.

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.