This is not a self-help book,” the author tells us, firmly. Appearances might suggest otherwise: it is written and presented almost entirely in the familiar style of that genre, with largish print, short sentences, snappy maxims in italics and lots of lists and charts (“six signs you may be on the wrong side of history”). Its proposals are delivered with all the annoyingly hectic bounciness of the genre.
But it is worth taking Bregman (a thirtysomething historian and author labelled “one of Europe’s most prominent young thinkers” by the Ted network) at his word. He begins from the deep and corrosive anomie experienced by so many gifted young professionals who find themselves making substantial sums of money in exhausting and (at best) morally compromising jobs. The “moral ambition” of the title is about recognising that serious financial, organisational, technological and analytical skills – the kind that in the US will get you through, say, law school with a secure ticket to prosperity – can be used to make tangible improvements in the lives of human and nonhuman neighbours.
For this to happen, we need vivid, granular narratives of how, in the past, this has become not just a possibility but an urgent imperative. In Nazi-occupied France and the Netherlands, who exactly sheltered Jews and why? In the 20th-century US, who named and shamed the naked abuses of corporate power? In the 18th century, how did the campaign to end the slave trade gain traction so decisively within a relatively short period of time?
The stories that Bregman tells are vivid and often genuinely inspiring. His pages on the career of the radical US activistRalph Naderand his spectacular series of victories over corporate inertia and self-interest stand in stark contrast with the near total abandonment of the values he stood for in the present-day US. But Bregman also has important things to say in his account of Nader about the nature of effective radical leadership, including distributing responsibilities and allowing a fair bit of room for people to set their own agendas (“The function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers,” Nader says).
Bregman does not gloss over the unhappy climax of Nader’s career, a presidential run in 2000 that effectively delivered the presidency to George W Bush. The unrelenting intensity of his campaigns, the demands he made of himself and others, and a near messianic confidence in his problem-solving abilities all contributed in the end to a profound unrealism and a deafness to criticism. Bregman – while provocatively claiming that to make a difference, you have to create something like a “cult” – is clear that unrelieved high-octane idealism is unsustainable and actively dangerous.
He has some judiciously positive things to say about the tangles of the “effective altruism” movement (much tarnished by the association with it of problematic figures such asSam Bankman-Fried). The one-note emphasis on measurable effectiveness encouraged the idea that you could do the maximum amount of good by making the maximum amount of money so that you could give it all away. But the effect of this was, for some, to blur the focus to the extent that trying to actually solve global problems could be replaced by discussing endlessly what you might do if you were even richer.
There is nothing morally superior about inefficiency, and no alibi for ineffectiveness to be found in good intentions. Bregman has stringent and necessary things to say about the myth of the “noble loser”, as he neatly christens it, in which purity of motive outweighs actual delivery. “Winning” is a moral imperative, and accountability is essential.
And accountability requires at least two critical habits. One is simply to take the trouble to find out what the problem is, especially from those who experience it firsthand. The other, more challengingly, is to beware of those varieties of purism and maximalism that make it impossible either to construct serious long-term strategies for policymaking, or to make tactical alliances with those who don’t necessarily share every detail of your convictions.
The developing awareness of intersectionality – the interwoven nature of a wide variety of factors that inhibit human dignity and freedoms – has been a genuinely important aspect of recent thinking about what justice might mean. Ultimately, talking about the emancipation of one group will and should lead you to see that you have to link it to the emancipation of other groups. But the danger, Bregman argues, is that you may end up refusing to work with anyone who does not sign up to a formidable and ever-expanding list of supposedly interconnected orthodoxies, a moral package-deal in which you can’t begin to act on one issue unless all the other bases are secured, and in which no one can be a genuine ally without acknowledging every article of the creed. It is a pseudo-religious attitude that leads inexorably to division and ineffectuality, privileging the sense of the activist’s moral integrity over any urgency around the alleviation of actual suffering.
As a corrective, Bregman describes a number of successful movements that have thought seriously about necessary tactical compromises and the acceptance of delay in order to arrive at a more secure if less dramatic outcome – from the abolitionist movement to the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955 (he shows how Rosa Parks’s famous protest was in fact carefully planned and “curated” for maximum impact).
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But this story and others illustrate a tension that Bregman never quite resolves – and which perhaps doesn’t lend itself to resolution. His appeal is very much to the high-flyer, looking for a cause that will give the fullest moral satisfaction; and there are pages where some readers at least will be tempted to mutter about white saviourism. Yet he is also admirably realistic about the need to park one’s own desire for a certain kind of sainthood, to accept the need for ordinary self-care so as to avoid falling victim either to burnout or – worse – to one’s own mythology, and to remain clear about what measurable differences might look like – never mind whether they are as dramatic and global as you would have wished. Because the book is pitched so strongly towards the young and gifted, there is a lot of emphasis on achievement and satisfaction – but the book as a whole probes more deeply, aware of the risks of self-dramatising.
Which is why it is indeed more than a self-help manual. It may be more optimistic than current global trends seem to warrant; it may be a bit thin on how you sustain imaginatively, even spiritually, the moral ambition it prescribes. But at its best it offers a bracingly hopeful perspective, insisting on the necessity of doing all you can to allow yourself to be sensitised and resensitised to that which eats away at the dignity not only of humanity but (an important element in Bregman’s argument) of the entire living environment. And, as he notes at the very end of the book, believing that individuals can’t make a difference is paradoxically a deeply individualistic conviction, a refusal to see the interwovenness of human agency. Oversimplified? Perhaps. But calls to arms often have to be.
Moral Ambition: Stop Wasting Your Talent and Start Making a Difference by Rutger Bregman is published by Bloomsbury (£20). To support the Guardian buy a copy atguardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.