I am not the target market for Dutch historian Rutger Bregman’s latest book, Moral Ambition: Stop Wasting Your Talent and Start Making a Difference. Bregman makes this clear upfront with his litmus test to determine who among us has the propensity for moral ambition: do you own a set of cheese knives? If the answer is yes, odds are that moral ambition is out of reach for you, cosseted as you are in your middle-class milieu.
As it happens, I own a set of cheese knives. It gets worse: they reside in my second home in the Cotswolds. (Does it make it worse or better that I don’t eat dairy? More on this later.) And yet, despite not being the young, smart audience Bregman is targeting in his plea to do something professionally that makes a difference in this world, I am smitten with this book.
I felt similarly nine years ago reading William MacAskill’s book, Doing Good Better, my introduction to effective altruism and its evidence-based approaches to benefitting others. This is fitting, as MacAskill, effective altruism and one of its most prominent non-profits, GiveWell, are all mentioned in Bregman’s book. He gives a clear-eyed assessment of where effective altruism gets it wrong (remember convicted crypto-fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried?) but still doesn’t want us to throw the baby out with the bathwater. I agree.
One of the most compelling stories in the book focuses on a Dutch village that hid more Jews during WWII than any other. What made this community different? For one, there was a charismatic person, previously on the fringes of society, who made it his job to relentlessly ask his neighbors to take in Jewish refugees. And asking, it seems, is the key. Subsequent studies demonstrated the one thing people who did good had in common that had a measurable impact: they were asked to help. What’s the moral of this story for this cheese-knife owner? Put yourself in situations where you will get asked to help.
The book’s appeal also lies in the context of our current moment. Between rising authoritarianism, humanitarian atrocities, and the escalating risk of AI’s impact on society that our politicians seem woefully ill-equipped to deal with, distracted as they are enabling the former, there’s a collective gaping maw thirsting for a reminder, nay a call, demanding moral ambition. In a prod to all my fellow hand-wringers, Bregman chides that the answer to the “What-would-you-do-if-you-lived-in-Hitler’s-Germany?” thought exercise is this: exactly what you are doing now. While Bregman makes his loathing of Trump clear elsewhere (in the pleasingly dispassionate manner I associate with the Dutch), this particular point is not about political leaders. Rather, it’s pointing out an essential truth about us.
Related, Bregman eviscerates the collective feeling of helplessness prominent amongst my peer group since the last U.S. election. There are limitless things we can do. Remember the jam jar experiment where, faced with 24 choices of jams, buyers gave up and ate their peanut butter straight, but faced with 6, they bought something? We are facing the same paradox of choice when it comes to how we might do good. Abundance is limiting our ability to act.
For now, I’m taking the baby steps you’d expect of a cheese-knife owner. I’m making some donations I’ve long been putting off, reactivating my monthly contribution to GiveWell, and taking the plunge to full veganism. (For years I’ve eaten “vegan” plus seafood for health reasons; this book reminded me of the indisputable suffering of some seafood I still eat, including fish and shrimp. No need to mock me, The Daily Show already did it exceptionally well here.)
I’m also reminded of one of the takeaways from reading Oliver Burkeman’s books, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals and Meditation for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts, earlier this year. In these, Burkeman makes the case for effectively lowering your barrier to entry to altruism, urging that we act on generous impulses rather than complicating them by trying to optimize them. This approach tempers the more pedantic side of effective altruism with a dose of common sense and an embrace of our own sentimentality—why not use it to tap our better angels?
I may lack Bregman’s criterion for being morally ambitious, but for now, I’ll be looking for ways where I can put myself in positions where I am asked to help. In a way, reading the book is just that. And if by chance you read this blog and you have something in mind, please ask.