There Are Four Lights

My new Book Blogging entries will be composed of my ideas and notes from books I’m currently reading, though I have some catching up to do in posting them. Enjoy!

I’ve reading Matt Ridley’s The Rational Optimist and thought about posting some of my favourite parts. The author has some pretty convincing arguments about how the world has been getting better, and should continue to.

I find that my disagreement is mostly with reactionaries of all political colours: blue ones who dislike cultural change, red ones who dislike economic change and green ones who dislike technological change. I am a rational optimist: rational, because I have arrived at optimism not through temperament or instinct, but by looking at the evidence.

One of his reasons for believing life will continue to get better is that humans do something that no other species does; widespread sharing of ideas.

…at some point in human history, ideas began to meet and mate, to have sex with each other.

The exchange of ideas is similar to the exchange of DNA and end up evolving, like biology does, but at a much faster pace. Of course, there are those who find accelerating change unsettling.

There are people today who think life was 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.

I really enjoyed the sections where he discusses how people often romanticize the past and just how fortunate we continue to become. The idea that people lived in an easier, stress-free, less complicated life than today is very much a myth.

There are also some very convincing arguments against organic farming. I was surprised by how clearly his facts pointed to a contrast from the eco-friendly method the organic industry markets itself as. Organic farming requires more land.

…to replace all the industrial nitrogen fertiliser now applied would mean an extra seven billion cattle grazing an extra thirty billion acres of pasture.

Organic farming is low-yield, requires extra land to feed cattle and requires crushed rock or fish to avoid exhausting the mineral nutrients from the soil “These have to be mined or netted”.

Should the world decide to go organic — that is, should farming get its nitrogen from plants and fish rather than direct from the air using factories and fossil fuels — then man of the nine billion will starve and all rainforest will be cut down.

More to come!