Moral Ambition by Rutger Bregman: An engaging attempt to get us to change the world
Moral Ambition: Stop Wasting Your Talent and Start Making a Difference
Author
:
Rutger Bregman
ISBN-13
:
978-1526680600
Publisher
:
Bloomsbury
Guideline Price
:
£20
Rutger Bregman is one of the most refreshing thinkers to have appeared around the time of the global pandemic, when many of us were seeking new approaches to living after the seismic shock of seeing millions dying.
Here was a new voice worth listening to; someone who looked at the rules of engagement honestly, whether he was slapping the barefaced cheeks of those at Davos by raising the subject of tax avoidance, or flummoxing Fox News's
Tucker Carlson
by calling him out during an interview as a millionaire funded by billionaires.
[
A 'really subversive idea': Most people are pretty decent
Opens in new window
]
Bregman has never philosophised in fear, but rather in positivity, and now he wants us to stop wasting our time in life and use it instead to make lasting changes: to show 'moral ambition' so that we are not only on the right side of history, but make our own contribution, too.
The Dutchman sets out that most people spend 80,000 hours of their lives working; time that, in the main, is meaningless if you exclude core services and essential jobs (he references David Graeber here, who conceptualised the idea of pointless, Sisyphean work in his essay Bullshit Jobs).
READ MORE
[
The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World by David Graeber: Intense flares of thought from a brilliant mind
Opens in new window
]
'Moral ambition is the will to make the world a wildly better place,' writes Bregman, 'to devote your working life to the great challenges of our time, whether that's
climate change
or corruption, gross inequality or the next pandemic. It's a longing to make a difference – and to build a legacy that truly matters.'
Bregman won't tell you how to do this. But he does show you ways in which it has been done, by rummaging through history and academia and gathering data and a cast of activists, innovators and entrepreneurs who – with the required moral ambition – achieved tectonic changes in issues such as slavery, racism and rights, medicine and science, and so on. (He admits many of those featured, but not all, shared degrees of privilege.)
It's an engaging, valid argument in the main, even if the book's own ambition can at times make it feel unwieldy, and some of the material may be overly familiar to some readers (Ralph Nader, Peter Singer, etc), whereas the moral ambition of someone such as
Rosa Parks
is a self-evident if necessary inclusion.
The author's ambitious optimism for a better tomorrow will see you through to the end though, and he's right about the next moral hurdle that humans must overcome: eating animals and feeling fine about it.
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