Or at least, first sightings by me of a couple ideas that have apparently been floating around for a year or two: Moral ambition, and progressive realism. There are new ideas in the world. Because experience and knowledge accumulate.
Big Think, Tim Brinkhof, 8 Jul 2024: Effective altruism is stumbling. Can “moral ambition” replace it?, subtitled “In ‘Moral Ambition,’ Dutch historian Rutger Bregman argues that all would benefit from a collective redefinition of success.”
I’m familiar with Rutger Bregman from his two books, UTOPIA FOR REALISTS (2014/2017) which I summarized/reviewed here, and HUMANKIND (2020), which I haven’t yet written up here (except for this.) Now he has a new book coming out, though it’s not on Amazon yet.
Key Takeaways
• Over 25% of workers in rich countries don’t think their job has any meaningful societal value. • This might be because the currency of success has been shifting from moral ambition to money over the years. • In his new book Moral Ambition, the Dutch sociologist and historian Rutger Bregman makes the case for how to live a more fulfilling life while making the world a little better in the process.
Sounds like a progressive notion that conservatives would dismiss in a knee-jerk. But let’s see what the article says.
It begins by discussing an essay against slavery, in 1785, by a Cambridge student named Thomas Clarkson.
According to Dutch journalist and best-selling author Rutger Bregman, Clarkson represents something we are sorely missing in today’s world: a willingness among young people to use their talent and ambition for the common good instead of personal profit and status. While some fall down social media rabbit holes about dropshipping, lured by the promise of getting rich quickly without making a meaningful contribution to society, others slave away in designer-furnished offices, working jobs that, though hard-earned and well-compensated, lack a clear meaning and purpose.
What to do instead? Create a new standard of success by shifting your ambition away from money and toward finding solutions for the world’s most pressing problems. That’s the main argument in Bregman’s Moral Ambition, which he described as an “almost embarrassingly ambitious book that aims to be the start of a new movement.”
There’s a flavor of Harari here, with the awareness that fewer and fewer jobs these days have societal value but exist because it’s assumed everyone must have jobs (see UTOPIA FOR REALISTS), and there’s an explicit link to the effective altruism movement, which Bregman thinks was misguided. But I’m not going to dwell on this piece just now, but rather wait for the book. (And catch up here on his second book.)
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Then there’s Robert Wright, who produced four substantial books beginning in the 1990s: THE MORAL ANIMAL, NONZERO, THE EVOLUTION OF GOD, and WHY BUDDHIST IS TRUE. I’ve read the first two, but written up neither on this blog. Since then he’s done journalism, a intermittently maintained website, Nonzero, and now a Substack, Nonzero Newsletter.
Washington Post, Robert Wright, 10 Jul 2024: Opinion | A foreign policy that sees the world, subtitled “I coined the term ‘progressive realism.’ What does it mean?”
Part of the issue here apparently is that his term is being used differently by others.
“Progressive realism,” according to Wikipedia, is “a foreign policy paradigm largely made popular by Robert Wright.” That’s me! So in principle I should have been gratified by the recent Foreign Affairs essay “The Case for Progressive Realism,” by British politician David Lammy. And I should be close to ecstatic now that Lammy, thanks to the Labour Party victory in last week’s election, is Britain’s foreign secretary.
Yet I’m not feeling festive. It turns out that Lammy’s version of progressive realism isn’t mine. Which, by itself, is okay; the world is full of policy prescriptions that aren’t mine, and many of them work out well. But I don’t think Lammy’s version of progressive realism will work out well.
Can well find a precise definition of what Wright means by it? Well, he begins by contrasting variations of what he calls “Blobthink,” characterized by extreme volatility and descent toward chaos. He quibbles about the worlds “realistic” and “realism”. And then he cites the principle that distinguishes his idea from the others.
That principle is this: You take nations as they are.
From a realist’s perspective, statecraft is about crafting relations with other states, not crafting the character of other states. Realists favor holding nations accountable for their behavior toward other nations but aren’t big on holding them accountable for their internal affairs. So a realist foreign policy doesn’t prioritize the promotion of either democracy or human rights. And realists are especially averse to the coercive promotion of these things — through invasion or bombing or economic sanctions.
That doesn’t mean realists are heartless. Many realists (including me) believe these forms of coercion rarely work and often backfire, harming their supposed beneficiaries. Cuba, Afghanistan, Venezuela, Syria — these and other countries are full of people the United States is supposedly trying to help with sanctions that are actually hurting them.
Thus he rejects Biden’s “Manichaean mantra” that we are “engaged in a global struggle between democracy and autocracy.”
A long piece; I’ll finish it tomorrow. But I’m intrigued by this passage:
The progressive realism I’m advocating is a radical ideology. It holds that the rule of law needs to move from the level of the nation-state to the level of the planet — and that this transition needs to start soon. We have to build global governance before the technologically based threats it could control overwhelm us and render the project hopeless.
As I’ve been saying… Yet this is precisely what conservatives are against. America first!
