The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
If you are anxious about when the sky will fall upon your head, you sure need to read this book that will awaken you from the ghastly trance cast by populists who make living out of scaring people. The fallacy of popular pessimistic views on the impending end of the world resulting from overpopulation, a lack of food, or any other apocalyptic reasons befitting a doomsday scenario, arises out of sheer ignorance of the nature of the human progress and/or of willful negligence of acknowledging it so as to populate epidemic scare across the globe for sensational attention and personal gains on the part of the popular authors of such doomsday scenarios.
This book by Matt Ridley is a fresh breath of air that gives people of the world a beacon of truth. Ridley asserts on the grounds of rational evidence and explanation that the progress of the human race within the historical times ranging from the ancient Greek/Roman times to the modern time has been made possible by collective human intelligence by which we exchange our ideas, skills, and knowledge in the form of specialized division of labor. This social collectivism, whether tacitly or unconsciously realized by doers, appertains to synchronicity, a kind of inter-brain entrainment in which information based on experience is exchanged between individuals, which is also known as collective phenomenon. This collective intelligence is a vital essence of cultural evolution which results from selection by imitation of successful institutions and habits. It is this element of cumulative culture that makes us singularly different from beasts. Since this social trait is innately pre-programmed in mankind, there is no inevitable end to specialization of efforts and talents that keeps this collective phenomenon going. In fact, more jobs will be produced in more specialized areas contrary to brooding premonition that technology will push out manpower from work.
In sum, Ridley aims to enlighten readers about the necessities of changes as part of cultural evolution for the betterment of mankind and the world itself. In the human history, no other time period has produced the better living conditions and cultural developments than those we have now due to a continued cumulative cultural evolution, which links to the evolution of the origins by natural selection. This book renders me a feeling that how wasteful it would be fretting about the uncertain and dark future that looks darker by popular theories of dystopian economic and social future. Just as Ridley will remain a steadfast rational optimist, I will continue to perform demands imposed upon daily tasks of life as a contribution to the orderliness and constancy of the world just as my ancestors did because I know the world will not fall in calamity as long as we as a collective body of the human race exist.
A Cat in the Mirror 