![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() How can it be "40 times lower"? Does he mean that it is now 2.5 percent (one-fortieth) of what it was? If so, then why not tell us? "Since 1980, the price of 1 watt of solar energy has plummeted 99%" (17). One irritating feature is how Bregman describes change, such as "In Western Europe, the murder rate is 40 times lower, on average, than what it was in the Middle Ages" (16). But it is very hard for the reader to discern-or even to have faith that Bregman tried to discern and discriminate. What would have seemed miraculous in the Middle Ages is now commonplace: the blind restored to sight, cripples who can walk, and the dead returned to life" (16).īregman, like many pop intellectuals, presents what he considers to be hard data derived from myriad sources, some no doubt the result of excellent research and some, equally with no doubt, derived from shoddy research. Equally catchy is his claim that "we are living in an age of Biblical prophecies come true. For roughly 99% of the world's history, 99% of humanity was poor, hungry, dirty, afraid, stupid, sick, and ugly" (13). Under the enigmatic subheading "The Return of Utopia" (so was there an earlier utopia?), Bregman catches our attention with "Let's start with a little history lesson: In the past, everything was worse. Poor editing has left this book with annoying grammatical and spelling errors such as "History is not a science that serves ups handy, bite-size lessons for daily life" (118). Perhaps I would not have responded this way were I reviewing it for a popular magazine rather than for a scholarly journal such as Utopian Studies. This work was written in Dutch and then translated into English by Elizabeth Manton, and one or the other has given the text a glib tone. While Pinker asserted that this should show us how well we are doing and that we ought to shun pessimism, Bregman takes the argument a step further and believes that this realization should allow us to achieve "utopia." The disadvantage for scholars is that such online publications usually have not been peer-reviewed or carefully edited.īregman starts off with the thesis, more effectively made by Steven Pinker in The Better Angels of Our Nature, that most people in the world are better fed, safer, richer, and healthier than people have ever been-that the vast majority of people today live in a manner that centuries ago would have seemed fantastically utopian and only two to three generations back would have been possible only for a miniscule elite. The advantages are that such groups can quickly publish popular items online and perhaps attract enough readers to convince publishers to present the material as books. This group, launched in 2013, styles itself as a "member-funded journalism platform for independent voices." This book reflects both the advantages and disadvantages of its origins. Utopia for Realists emerged from a Netherlands-based, Web discussion site called The Correspondent. ![]()
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