The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves by Matt Ridley
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Very valuable read overall. Apart from the secularism and the evolutionary assumptions, Ridley does a great job of describing things in a way that counteracts the very common and insistent cultural pessimistic narrative. Postmillenialists need to read this kind of stuff together with their scriptural studies. Eschatology, markets and progress all go together.
Sodomy, markets, and progress go together too, though.
Or, to put it another way:
It is amazing how little self awareness there is among American free market conservatives. It doesn’t take a genius to realize that adherence to an ideology in which maximization of choice is a positive good will dissolve traditional morality and weaken social and familial bonds.
More choice is adiaphora the content of the choice is what matters.
Or recognising that allowing “more choice” for one person requires “less choice” for another; freedom is always balanced by constraint somewhere else. So in that sense, I don’t think it’s neutral. (If you’re using “adiaphora” to mean “no specific command from Scripture” I partly agree, but there’s still some obvious rights and wrongs there.)
“Or recognising that allowing “more choice” for one person requires “less choice” for another; freedom is always balanced by constraint somewhere else.” Uh, No.
Thanks for explaining! You just cleared up all my lingering doubts about gay marriage. Love is love!
To adapt a saying, there is only one sexuality — the American sexuality!
And it’s neither the gender nor the orientation that matters, it’s the person! So says my daughter, who only dates young men. Could you flesh out this principle a bit for me? I understand that giving me the choice to smoke in a restaurant removes others’ choice not to inhale nicotine with their dinner. Allowing drug-fueled orgies in the park removes the choice of parents to have their children play on the swings. But, if there were no anti-discrimination laws which compel people to provide services to those whose actions they disapprove of, how would one person’s sexual choices reduce… Read more »
At minimum, a claim for a particular liberty is a statement of constraint on the king or his deputies. To say that adultery should be legal is to deny the king’s right to punish public wickedness.
But doesn’t this just become a tautology? Any liberty I claim–even a good one–is a constraint on the king’s right to prevent me from exercising it if he happens not to like it. So “liberty” becomes “anything the king doesn’t object to.” And, what if the king has no sexual morality, like Edward VII and XVIII? .
Yes, now you get it.
I’m using adiaphora in the sense of something not specific my prescribed that should be worked out with wisdom. You could also say “doubtful things” from in necessariis unitas, in dubiis libertas, in omnibus caritas.
Some choices are clearly proscribed, but the economic structure of a society is adiaphora (which doesn’t mean there isn’t right and wrong, or worse and better).
This is a time I agree with you. Though I think we probably have significant differences here still, I think that a major blind spot of libertarianism is their failure to recognize that “control” can come from multiple different spheres, and weakening power by one actor often strengthens the power of another.
The biggest problem is that this marketization and commodification of the country has seeped into the church. And why not? If it magically brings about salvation in the public square, who needs the holiness of Jesus?
We rail against the commercialization and materialism of our culture, all while promoting it in the church.
I’ve probably linked this before, but this is one of my favourite pieces on that phenomenon: Why Methodists Don’t Go To Heaven
Thanks for the article. I love intelligent reading.
Especially ones that confirm my suspicion that Methodists won’t actually get to Heaven.
Very very good piece. He says so much that I found points of potential disagreement, but I certainly agreed with the main thrust. Some time ago I attended a talk by Scott Bessenecker which touched on many of the same points. Protestantism has often been structured along corporate lines, often to its detriment. One thing that I think was missing from the piece (I can’t remember if Scott touched on it), is that such a corporate model doesn’t only sell to the mainstream view. You also will, of course, get niche markets pandering to various subsets. The point isn’t that… Read more »
Not having read this book, but having read others like it, I have a fairly good idea what to expect. You misrepresent your trends so it looks like as many as possible are on the upswing, then you assume they will always be that way, then you do some hand-waving to explain away the trends that are on the downswing and assume that those, and only those, are the ones that are going to flip around and improve. Jared Diamond’s “Collapse” is a good example of a very different take on why it is folly to pin your hopes to… Read more »