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.
May 18 to May 24 Pastor Yang Hsu’s (楊煦) congregation was shocked upon seeing the land he chose to build his orphanage. It was surrounded by mountains on three sides, and the only way to access it was to cross a river by foot. The soil was poor due to runoff, and large rocks strewn across the plot prevented much from growing. In addition, there was no running water or electricity. But it was all Yang could afford. He and his Indigenous Atayal wife Lin Feng-ying (林鳳英) had already been caring for 24 orphans in their home, and they were in
President William Lai (賴清德) yesterday delivered an address marking the first anniversary of his presidency. In the speech, Lai affirmed Taiwan’s global role in technology, trade and security. He announced economic and national security initiatives, and emphasized democratic values and cross-party cooperation. The following is the full text of his speech: Yesterday, outside of Beida Elementary School in New Taipei City’s Sanxia District (三峽), there was a major traffic accident that, sadly, claimed several lives and resulted in multiple injuries. The Executive Yuan immediately formed a task force, and last night I personally visited the victims in hospital. Central government agencies and the
Australia’s ABC last week published a piece on the recall campaign. The article emphasized the divisions in Taiwanese society and blamed the recall for worsening them. It quotes a supporter of the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) as saying “I’m 43 years old, born and raised here, and I’ve never seen the country this divided in my entire life.” Apparently, as an adult, she slept through the post-election violence in 2000 and 2004 by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), the veiled coup threats by the military when Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) became president, the 2006 Red Shirt protests against him ginned up by
As with most of northern Thailand’s Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) settlements, the village of Arunothai was only given a Thai name once the Thai government began in the 1970s to assert control over the border region and initiate a decades-long process of political integration. The village’s original name, bestowed by its Yunnanese founders when they first settled the valley in the late 1960s, was a Chinese name, Dagudi (大谷地), which literally translates as “a place for threshing rice.” At that time, these village founders did not know how permanent their settlement would be. Most of Arunothai’s first generation were soldiers
RSS