Interesting quote from Steve Bridge

From his review of Matt Ridley's book The Rational Optimist, in the 2nd Quarter 2010 issue of Cryonics magazine:

Ridley, though obviously a libertarian, often refers to “the group mind” as the reason the human race progresses. It’s an interesting term for a libertarian to use. I want you to remember that the human race is made up of individuals – like you – who move things along by making individual discoveries and decisions. The world is not going to develop cryonic suspension or life extension and then just hand it to you. If you want these technologies to work for YOU, you can’t be all pessimist or all optimist. You must help us fill the glass.

If someone is either too optimistic or too pessimistic, they will miss signing up for cryonics. The positivists will assume that everyone will be saved in the great sweep of humanity to the future. The negativists will say, why bother, we’re doomed anyway. If you are either one of those — please stay away from me and from everyone else at Alcor. We don’t have time to listen to you.

If you consider yourself to be optimistic about the future, great. Stay active in making that positive future come true. Make the individual decision to sign up for cryonics, work to improve your community and city, support education and libraries, interact with your fellow humans and persuade them to help with positive goals.

If you are pessimistic about the chances of cryonics working or about the future of your country or the human race, don’t just sit on your back end and gripe about it. Become an ACTIVE pessimist. Sign up for cryonics so you can find the problems and help solve them. If they get solved, we can help you find other things to be an active pessimist about, I promise.

I try to do my small part.

BTW, Steve in this review contrasts Ridley's case for "rational optimism" with the forecasts of a capital-A Apocalypse based on environmentalism and the hostility towards industrial production and trade characteristic of the left. I'd like to see more critical thinking applied to the right's analogous doomsday beliefs, like the Hyperinflationary Economic Collapse promoted by the Jehovah's Witnesses-like Austrian economists.

Philipp Blom in his new book, A Wicked Company: The Forgotten Radicalism of the European Enlightenment, speculates that Western culture inherited the belief that humanity faces a secular Final Judgment because Christianity really won the culture war fought by the Enlightenment, thanks in part to the influence of the paranoid oddball and defector to religion Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Blom suspects that we would have outgrown this way of thinking if the outlook of Holbach's and Diderot's school of philosophes had prevailed instead. This raises in my mind the question of what the Chinese, now the economically and politically ascendant society in the world, think about "the future," given their culture's long history of independence from the Christian world view.