The Irrational Optimist | Commentary

Matt Ridley skewers the naïve instinct to wax nostalgically for the past in his book The Rational Optimist. He starts out with an example of life at the beginning of the 19th century to illustrate this:

There are people today who think life better in the past. They argue that there was not only a simplicity, tranquility, sociability, and spirituality about life in the distant past that has been lost, but a virtue too. This rose tinted nostalgia, please note, is generally confined to the wealthy. It is easier to wax elegiacally for the life of a peasant when you do not have to use a long drop toilet.
Imagine that it is 1800 somewhere in Western Europe or eastern North America. The family is gathered around the hearth in a simple timber framed house. Father reads from the Bible while mother prepares to dish out a stew of beef and onions. The baby boy is being comforted by one of his sisters and the oldest lad is pouring water from a pitcher into earthenware mugs on the table. His older sister is feeding the horse outside in the stable. There is no noise of traffic. There are no drug dealers. Neither dioxins nor radioactive fallout have been found in the cow’s milk. Always tranquil. A bird sings outside the window…

At this point Ridley pulls back the curtain giving us a glimpse of what’s really going on:

Though this is one of the better off families in the village, father’s scripture reading is interrupted by a bronchitic cough which presages the pneumonia that will kill him at 53, not helped by the smoke from the fire. Indoor air pollution is still a leading cause of mortality worldwide, often from that romantic hearth. He is lucky. The life expectancy even in England was less than 40 in 1800. The baby will die of the smallpox that is now causing him to cry. His sister will soon be the chattel of a drunken husband. The water the son is pouring tastes of the cows that drink from the brook. A toothache tortures the mother. The neighbors’ lodger is getting the other girl pregnant in the hay shed even now and her child will be sent to an orphanage. The stew is gray and grizzly, yet the meat is a rare change from gruel. There is no fruit or salad in this season. It is eaten with a wooden spoon from a wooden bowl. Candles cost too much so fire light is all there is to see by. No one in the family has ever seen a play, painted a picture, or heard a piano. School is a few years of dull Latin taught by a bigoted Martinet at the vicarage. Father visited the city once, but the travel cost him a week’s wages and the others have never traveled more than 15 miles from home. Each daughter owns two wool dresses, two linen shirts, and one pair of shoes. Father’s jacket cost him a month’s wages, but is now infested by lice. The children sleep two to a bed on straw mattresses on the floor. As for the bird outside the window, tomorrow it will be trapped and eaten by the boy.¹

Ridley makes his point beautifully. A little gratitude for what we have goes a long way. He is right to remind us of this. In countless ways modern life is much more tolerable than it once was. Consider a working class family in the 21st century sitting comfortably in their air conditioned home. It’s the dog days of summer but no one breaks a sweat. The doorbell rings. Dinner is here. A hot meal made to order is delivered to their door. It costs only a tiny fraction of their disposable income. Each member of the family carries a supercomputer in their pocket that also serves as a telecommunication device letting any one of them summon a meal like this any time they want. There is no arguing over what to watch on TV because there are enough screens for everyone with seemingly infinite content to watch. They don’t need to go into the city to a enjoy a drama or take in a symphony. Kings and queens of yore would envy them. Father developed carpal tunnel from his work which required surgery to correct. He was in and out of the hospital the same day thanks to endoscopy, antibiotics, and modern pain medication. It’s a far cry from the black lung disease his grandfather suffered. After dinner he dozes in his easy chair while his favorite team plays on the TV.

Father’s stamina isn’t what it used to be. Too many of those takeout meals coupled with his sedentary lifestyle caused him to be grossly overweight. This contributed to his carpal tunnel. Obesity is also the reason he has to inject himself with insulin multiple times a day after his body stopped producing it. He knows he should exercise more. But that’s practically impossible considering he spends an hour and a half sitting in his car each day going to and from work with at least another nine hours sitting at his desk. The job affords him a suburban lifestyle and a nice truck, although he has no choice but to spend large chunks of his life sitting bored in traffic on his way to the soul-deadening office. He has little or no interaction outside of work with the people at the office or the customers he serves thanks to the long commute. And he’s almost as distant from his neighbors considering he leaves the house early and returns rather late.

While father dozes, the boy is in his room watching porn. The same device used to summon a meal can conjure depictions of almost any imaginable sex act. He’ll be plagued by impotence beginning in his mid-twenties as a result of his obsession that started when he was just eleven years old.

The boy is not the man’s son. The man’s children live with their mother in another state. His daughter, whom he barely sees, has difficulty fitting in at school and blames herself for her parents’ separation. There are no vicars to give her a hard time at the public school. But the other intellectually disengaged children fill that role nicely. Lacking any secure possession of self worth that comes from accomplishment and embodied competence, these students learn to ruthlessly manage appearances through credentials and on social media. As a result, she becomes the regular target of bullying. The school is absolutely no help as it vigorously maintains the fiction of value-neutrality.² These intellectually damaged students lack curiosity, independent thought, and strong character. In other words, schools are supplying what the largest employers need to keep relatively affluent people dependent on purchased supplies.

Father cherishes his perceived freedom, unaware that he’s completely subordinate to a form of economic totalitarianism. He gets to choose what car to drive and what shows to watch. But he has no choice other than to do the work that the economy prescribes for the wage it sets. He cannot imagine how he would earn a living otherwise. His employer no longer produces goods. That’s all done somewhere else. The focus of the company is on projecting a brand. Their product is a state of mind within the consumer. What father does on a daily basis has no value apart from the work of everyone else. His work is without any obvious effect. There are no objective standards to measure his performance. So like the school children, managers like him simply manage appearances. This degradation of work damages the best parts of him. The workplace is dumbed down. Judgment and intuition are stripped away. Work is reduced to following procedures and checking boxes. Conscientiousness is a liability in a system like this that rewards irresponsibility.³ Consumer debt and health insurance are what keep him coming back each day. After all, the health insurance is what sustains his opioid addiction which developed after they severed the ligament in his wrist to ‘fix’ the carpal tunnel.⁴

Geographically dislocated and dispossessed by his addiction, father is unable to help his daughter through her torment at school. She does the unthinkable and tries to take her own life. Her mother finds her just in time. The adept medical staff saves her life. Unfortunately, she has moderate brain damage. She’ll be dependent on others to care for her for the rest of her life. This of course falls on her single mother. She’s a strong proponent of the women’s movement but she feels anything but liberated.⁵ The world looks on, watching documentaries on Netflix about suicide clusters and the opioid crisis. At least they have air conditioning.

Note: This is not to disparage Ridley’s book in any way. His message is important. And it’s sorely needed to offset pessimists like myself. But we should never presume that humanity is on some unremitting march of progress. History (and presumably the future) is better characterized as a series of advances and retreats. I suspect Ridley would agree that things can turn on a dime. The point isn’t that scientific progress is good or bad. Science yields many wonderful things. It’s also brought us eugenics and the threat of nuclear holocaust. The thing that concerns me is what happens when we exhaust the Judeo-Christian inheritance that once sustained us. No one is seriously arguing that we should go back to 1800. I’m certainly not. But one can imagine scenarios where a civilizational collapse sets us back even further. I think we’d all like to avoid something like that. Those who suggest that someone like myself wishing to recover lost meaning and purpose would just as soon give up modern medicine are completely disingenuous. These things are not incompatible. There was never any reason to sacrifice meaning and purpose to get modern medicine in the first place. Let us strive to improve our overall condition. At the same time, let us conserve the many good things that Ridley points out.

This post was originally published on April 24, 2021

_{Photo credit: “Cosmeston Medieval Village” by missy & the universe is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0.}

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