[p2p-research] another review of ridley

[Michel Bauwens]

from
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/the-rational-optimist-by-matt-ridleybr-pandoras-seed-by-spencer-wells-1996793.html
 :

Ridley's view is often blinkered. His grand historical sweep revels in the
success of past civilisations, but their demise is glossed over in a
sentence. At one point, he describes how an "endless series of empires" in
Mesopotamia have failed, among them "Sumerians, Babylonians, Persians,
Roman, Mongol, Ottoman, British, Saddamite, Bushite... Each empire was the
product of trading wealth and was itself the eventual cause of that wealth's
destruction." He averts his eyes and moves on.

But this is the issue. No doubt each of those empires contained their own
Matt Ridleys, the rational optimist of their day who said all was well.
Jared Diamond, in his book Collapse, described how, as he put it, "societies
choose to fail". Consumed by rational optimism, they could not see the end
coming and failed to prevent it.

Ridley would say that each failed civilisation was replaced by something
better – and ultimately by us. But today we have one global society, whose
specialisation and trading networks sustain unprecedented numbers of people.
Good for us. We are now one. But that leaves us uniquely vulnerable if we,
too, choose to fail. There is nowhere else for us to go: nobody to bail us
out. Our planet, our species, has no lender of last resort. It would be
curtains.

I like optimism. Ridley is right to stress that the doomsters have been
proved wrong before. The world has got through a period of maximum
population growth without hundreds of millions starving. Family sizes round
the world are falling without any compulsion, so we can see Malthus was
wrong. We are living longer, healthier, more interesting and often freer and
more prosperous lives.

We need optimists to gird us for tasks ahead and prevent us from subsiding
into the paralysing pessimism that grips many environmentalists. But those
tasks remain. When optimists like Ridley end up telling us all is well as we
hurtle towards the cliff, then they are the enemies of the future. And they
are certainly not being rational.


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