John Tierney of the New York Times reviews Matt Ridley’s The Rational Optimist, which he dubs the newest addition to the slender canon of books noting that society has failed to collapse and might go on prospering:
It does much more than debunk the doomsaying. Dr. Ridley provides a grand unified theory of history from the Stone Age to the better age awaiting us in 2100. [...] What made Homo sapiens so special? Dr. Ridley argues that it wasn’t our big brain, because Neanderthals had a big brain, too. Nor was it our willingness to help one another, because apes and other social animals also had an instinct for reciprocity.
“At some point,” Dr. Ridley writes, “after millions of years of indulging in reciprocal back-scratching of gradually increasing intensity, one species, and one alone, stumbled upon an entirely different trick. Adam gave Oz an object in exchange for a different object.”
The evidence for this trick is in perforated seashells from more than 80,000 years ago that ended up far from the nearest coast, an indication that inlanders were bartering to get ornamental seashells from coastal dwellers. Unlike the contemporary Neanderthals, who apparently relied just on local resources, those modern humans could shop for imports.
“The extraordinary promise of this event was that Adam potentially now had access to objects he did not know how to make or find; and so did Oz,” Dr. Ridley writes. People traded goods, services and, most important, knowledge, creating a collective intelligence: “Ten individuals could know between them ten things, while each understanding one.”
As they specialized and exchanged, humans learned how to domesticate crops and animals and sell food to passing merchants. Traders congregated in the first cities and built ships that spread goods and ideas around the world.
The Phoenician merchants who sailed the Mediterranean were denounced by Hebrew prophets like Isaiah and Greek intellectuals like Homer. But trading networks enabled the ancient Greeks to develop their alphabet, mathematics and science, and later fostered innovation in the trading hubs of the Roman Empire, India, China, Arabia, Renaissance Italy and other European capitals.
Rulers like to take credit for the advances during their reigns, and scientists like to see their theories as the source of technological progress. But Dr. Ridley argues that they’ve both got it backward: traders’ wealth builds empires, and entrepreneurial tinkerers are more likely to inspire scientists than vice versa. From Stone Age seashells to the steam engine to the personal computer, innovation has mostly been a bottom-up process.
While I tend to agree that society has progressed tremendously since the start of the Industrial Revolution, and it should continue to progress exponentially, we know that many proud civilizations have fallen. Even a tiny chance of societal collapse is worth guarding against.
Just last century, Western Civilization almost destroyed itself — but the US served admirably as an off-site back-up. This prediction could have been written in 1910:
“Prosperity spreads, technology progresses, poverty declines, disease retreats, fecundity falls, happiness increases, violence atrophies, freedom grows, knowledge flourishes, the environment improves and wilderness expands.”
Yes, that prediction you quote might indeed have been made in 1910 — and would have been correct. The degree of progress and improvement in the human condition in the last 100 years has been simply phenomenal — off the charts, compared to past eras. Anyone interested in this subject should read my own book, The Case for Rational Optimism (Transaction Books, Rutgers University, 2009), which makes points and arguments quite similar to Ridley’s, but develops the case for optimism over a broader range of subject areas.
Certainly the economic growth we’ve seen since 1910 has been phenomenal, but any rosy prediction from 1910 would be missing the carnage of World War I, the collapse of global trade that came with it, The Communist Revolution in Russia, the Great Depression, World War II, mass starvations in Communist Russia and newly Communist China, etc.
What would have happened if the US hadn’t served as an off-site back-up for Western Civilization?