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In a debate that is remarkable for the mendacity of its
participants, Microsoft billionaire and self-appointed savior of
the world’s poor answers one Matt Ridley in the pages of the Wall
Street Journal last Saturday, an appropriate locale for such
figures. Gates’s piece, titled Africa Needs Aid, Not Flawed
Theories, an attack on Ridley’s latest exercise in sociobiology
“The Rational Optimist.” Unlike most sociobiologists who lean
toward Hobbesian pessimism, Ridley is one of those people who
think that our genes predispose us to cooperation. His 1997
Origins of Virtue argues that the human mind has evolved a special
instinct for social exchange, for example. Gates, like Soros and
other movers and shakers, appears very much worried about the
ability of the capitalist system to reproduce itself and therefore
finds Ridley’s arguments Panglossian even though he does not use
that term:
Mr. Ridley dismisses concern about climate change as another
instance of unfounded pessimism. His discussion in this chapter is
provocative, but he fails to prove that we shouldn’t invest in
reducing greenhouse gases. I asked Ken Caldeira, a scientist who
studies global ecology at the Carnegie Institution for Science, to
look over this part of the book. He pointed out that Mr. Ridley
celebrates declining air-pollution emissions in the U.S. but does
not acknowledge that this has come about because of government
regulations based on publicly funded science, which Mr. Ridley
opposes. As Mr. Caldeira rightly observes, “It is a wonder of
development that our economy can grow as air pollution
diminishes.” What is true of the U.S. case, I’d suggest, can be
true of the world as a whole as we deal with the challenges posed
by climate change.
Gates does admit that it is possible to be overly pessimistic:
The most obvious instance of excessive pessimism in [John Stuart]
Mill’s era was the “Communist Manifesto.” In one of history’s
great ironies, Karl Marx used the profits from the German textile
mills of Friedrich Engels’s father to support the writing and
distribution of a political philosophy based on pessimism about
capitalism.
Of course, the Communist Manifesto was neither “optimistic” nor
“pessimistic” about capitalism. It simply recorded that it was
transforming the world and creating the objective conditions for
socialism.
full:
http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2010/12/01/bill-gates-debates-sociobiologist-matt-ridley-about-africas-future/
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