Many years ago there was a BBC children’s TV program called Why Don’t You Just Switch Off Your Television Set and Go and Do Something Less Boring Instead?. Its aim was to encourage kids to spending their summer holidays helping grannies across the street or litter-picking rather than lying on the sofa filling their faces with cheese puffs. If I’m anything to go by, it didn’t work.
Moral Ambition is Why Don’t You? for grownups, written by a Dutch historian but deploying psychologically sophisticated nudge techniques, shaming devices and a hectoring imperative mood to encourage clever if spiritually bankrupt people like you (no offense) to do something beyond making mortgage payments by means of a job you hate. Don’t you realize that the average worker will spend 80,000 hours at their job and, judging by the look of you (again, no offense), 79,999 of those will involve doing things that are of negligible ethical value — such as helping tech firms avoid tax, cold-calling for loan consolidation companies, or writing Observer book reviews?
Rutger Bregman its an upbeat guy. He was described by the Guardian as “the Dutch wunderkind of new ideas” and is the bestselling author of eight books including can-do tomes such as 2020’s Humankind: A Hopeful History and 2017’s Utopia for Realists: And How We Can Get There. In this book he is upbeat once more, counseling that we can free ourselves from feelings of career-long uselessness and lack of fulfillment. He makes great use of the bullshit jobs concept devised by David Graeber.
“A world without teachers or dock-workers would soon be in trouble,” wrote Graeber, the late anthropologist. “But it’s not entirely clear how humanity would suffer were all private equity CEOs, lobbyists, PR researchers, actuaries, telemarketers, bailiffs or legal consultants to similarly vanish.”
Or, you might add, anthropologists and historians. But the point remains. Our world is in trouble — from climate catastrophe, manbaby authoritarian leaders, pathogens, pollution, nuclear weapons and other terrible things. Did you get all those degrees and amass all those debts to be a spectator to the end times? Or are you going to make the world better?
Bregman quotes a Facebook employee.
“The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.”
In a sense Moral Ambition is the altruistic sequel to Oliver Burkeman’s bestseller Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. While Burkeman gave readers tools for constructing a meaningful life, Bregman seeks to inspire us with socially desirable ways of putting new skills of time management to virtuous use. In that respect, his book is a welcome antidote to self-help books that give readers 12 rules for life, seven habits for success or surefire methods to achieving that most fatuous of goals, personal happiness.
That said, I wonder if there is a market for this book: most readers want to sink into the warm bath of a Richard Osman after toiling at the coalface rather than be told over 300 pages that they’re doing this life business all wrong. George Monbiot’s blurb for the book offers a challenge.
“I defy you to read it and not be motivated to act,” he writes.
But, with all due respect, the world teems with people who defy Monbiot’s imperatives 24/7, even if it would be a better place if they had not.
Moreover, several of the heroes (abolitionists, civil rights leaders, virologists and radical nerds using bureaucratic skills to virtuous ends) here offered to us as role models only serendipitously stumbled into doing good — which suggests that the most morally effective of us may not be catalyzed into changing their lives by books like Bregman’s.
Take Rob Mather. One day in 2003, the thirtysomething executive was watching telly when up popped a news item about a girl called Terri who had lost fingers, toes, one foot, her ears and nose in a house fire started by her mother’s cigarette. He organized a million-strong Swimathon for Terri and then, having got a taste for using his powers for good, looked around for another morally ambitious project. He settled on malaria, organizing in 2005 a World Swim Against Malaria in which more than 250,000 people from 160 countries took part, and then the Against Malaria Foundation, which has since raised more than US$600 million and distributed more than 250m mosquito nets.
Moral? “You can catch the moral ambition bug and start to transform your life and career.”
In a world where narcissism, spiritual passivity and ethical complacency are not just commonplace but integral to the business model of social media, how lovely to come across such idealism. And such idealism precludes virtue signaling or other self-regarding hand-wringing.
Bregman quotes late American psychologist Herbert Simon: “Sometimes we just want to scream loudly at injustice, or to stand up and be counted. These are noble motives, but any serious revolutionist must often deprive himself of the pleasures of self-expression. He must judge his actions by their ultimate effects.”
The last chapter, called Make Future Historians Proud, entertains the naive idea of what he calls “chronocentrism” — the notion that the times we live in are especially important.
“I’m now convinced that our times are indeed unique and critically important, perhaps determining everything to come,” writes Bregman. “Of 117 billion people who’ve ever lived, we’re part of the 1 percent who can make a difference this century. We’re at a historic crossroads. The future hinges on what we do next.”
How about trying to do for human trafficking, air pollution, nuclear weapons and/or toxic masculinity what Rob Mather did for malaria.
In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels wrote: “Workers of the world, unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains!”
Bregman’s suggestion is similar. Let the morally ambitious of the world act. We have nothing to lose but our cheese puffs.
June 2 to June 8 Taiwan’s woodcutters believe that if they see even one speck of red in their cooked rice, no matter how small, an accident is going to happen. Peng Chin-tian (彭錦田) swears that this has proven to be true at every stop during his decades-long career in the logging industry. Along with mining, timber harvesting was once considered the most dangerous profession in Taiwan. Not only were mishaps common during all stages of processing, it was difficult to transport the injured to get medical treatment. Many died during the arduous journey. Peng recounts some of his accidents in
“Why does Taiwan identity decline?”a group of researchers lead by University of Nevada political scientist Austin Wang (王宏恩) asked in a recent paper. After all, it is not difficult to explain the rise in Taiwanese identity after the early 1990s. But no model predicted its decline during the 2016-2018 period, they say. After testing various alternative explanations, Wang et al argue that the fall-off in Taiwanese identity during that period is related to voter hedging based on the performance of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). Since the DPP is perceived as the guardian of Taiwan identity, when it performs well,
The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) on May 18 held a rally in Taichung to mark the anniversary of President William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20. The title of the rally could be loosely translated to “May 18 recall fraudulent goods” (518退貨ㄌㄨㄚˋ！). Unlike in English, where the terms are the same, “recall” (退貨) in this context refers to product recalls due to damaged, defective or fraudulent merchandise, not the political recalls (罷免) currently dominating the headlines. I attended the rally to determine if the impression was correct that the TPP under party Chairman Huang Kuo-Chang (黃國昌) had little of a
A short walk beneath the dense Amazon canopy, the forest abruptly opens up. Fallen logs are rotting, the trees grow sparser and the temperature rises in places sunlight hits the ground. This is what 24 years of severe drought looks like in the world’s largest rainforest. But this patch of degraded forest, about the size of a soccer field, is a scientific experiment. Launched in 2000 by Brazilian and British scientists, Esecaflor — short for “Forest Drought Study Project” in Portuguese — set out to simulate a future in which the changing climate could deplete the Amazon of rainfall. It is
RSS