Feeling reasonably happy with yourself, are you? Modestly satisfied with what you’ve achieved in life? Excellent, because you may be feeling rather less comfortable after reading this book. This is a work with one big message: Could Do Better.
Who could? Many of us could. Instead of following the conventional path towards whatever we define as success, we could be taking stock of our talents, asking how we can make the world a better place, then getting on with helping other people instead of focusing on our selfish desires.
Bregman is a popular historian and bestselling author from the Netherlands, who may be best known for taking a stand at the World Economic Forum in Davos calling on the super-wealthy to pay more tax. He calls his new release “not a book that makes life easier, but one that makes life a little harder”.
No, not everyone is free to think beyond the day-to-day struggle, he admits, but many people are – and should. And to ward off the what-can-just-one-person-do argument, he offers inspirational stories of people who have achieved great things for others, often against extraordinary odds.
So, we learn about a campaigner against the slave trade, a Dutch hero who found hiding places for Jews during World War II and a fighter for car safety, among other case studies in doing good.
A more current, and perhaps more relatable, example is that of Rob Mather, a British business executive who heard about a little girl who had suffered terrible burns and decided to raise money for her care by convincing 10,000 people to take part in swimathons. That done, he put his fundraising skills to work in the fight against malaria, which still kills hundreds of thousands of people every year.
Mather set up the Against Malaria Foundation, which convinced lots more people to leap into the water for fundraising swims and attracted big-money supporters. It has so far raised almost US$750 million and distributed 340 million insecticide-impregnated mosquito nets. As well as saving countless lives, the organisation has earned plaudits as one of the world’s most effective charities.
So, it can be done: an organisation that starts with one person can make a big difference, even against problems that seem insuperable and even without vast resources, if it chooses its target carefully and pursues it with sufficient obsession.
If you’re idealistic enough to agree, Bregman wants you to set big goals – combating climate change, maybe, or nuclear proliferation, or Third World poverty. He doesn’t quite say so, but I don’t think he will be wildly impressed if your version of doing good is volunteering for a few shifts at the local hospice shop or joining a neighbourhood rat-trapping group.
What he has in mind looks a lot like the start-up culture that launched many of today’s tech giants: small groups of people coming together, precisely identifying what they want to achieve, working out a strategy, testing and modifying it if necessary, moving fast and keeping their organisation lean.
There’s even a school in London where you can learn this sort of thing. It’s been called “Hogwarts for do-gooders”, though the official name is Charity Entrepreneurship, and it acts as a start-up incubator for charities. Its goal is to work out effective solutions for large-scale problems, train people for the job, line them up with seed funding and put them to work.
Charity Entrepreneurship claims to have launched more than 40 non-profit organisations, working on everything from encouraging immunisation to reducing lead levels in paint and making shrimp farming more sustainable and more humane.
All fine goals, no doubt, but many obstacles await to trip up even the most dedicated campaigner. So, as well as being an exhortation to do good works, this book is also a bit of a primer in how to – and how not to – go about it.
He doesn’t quite say so, but I don’t think he will be wildly impressed if your version of doing good is volunteering for a few shifts at the local hospice shop or joining a neighbourhood rat-trapping group.
Good intentions aren’t enough, writes Bregman. Raising awareness is much overrated, campaigners for any cause have to be pragmatic, and that can mean learning to co-operate with people who don’t share your views.
It’s all about what might be called realistic idealism – setting goals that may be pie in the sky, but then pursuing them with ruthless pragmatism.
One big problem is what he calls “the illusion of synergy”, or the idea that all good causes go together. Some campaigners appear to believe that if they’re fighting against climate change, for example, they also have to fight against racism and for gender diversity, an end to poverty, free childcare, saving dolphins, and on and on until there are so many noble goals that not much gets done about any of them.
Nor is Bregman much of a fan of protest, at least not protest by itself. To be effective, he says, protest has to be the visible face of a larger behind-the-scenes movement. So when Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of the bus in 1955, it was anything but a lone protest; she was a cog in a highly organised movement that used many tactics to get civil rights legislation through the US Congress.
Less successfully, remember the Occupy protests that were so big after the 2008 Global Financial Crisis? Plenty of moral outrage there, but all the noise doesn’t seem to have achieved much, and the gap between the rich and the other 99% has kept growing.
As noted at the start of this review, this is not a book that’s calculated to make you feel comfortable. You may, for example, think it’s preachy, which it unashamedly is. You may feel you have every right to live your own life without being lectured on your moral duty to do more. You might say it overstates the need for more non-profit start-ups while underplaying the need for more people to work with established charities. And if you’re a committed activist, you may resent being told you’re probably doing it all wrong.
I suspect Bregman wouldn’t much care about such quibbles. He’s out to provoke a reaction, in the best of causes.
Moral Ambition, by Rutger Bregman (Bloomsbury, $38.99), is published on April 29.
