Review of For the Good of the World

Writing has always entranced me. There is something magical in seeing words order themselves into sentences, sentences into paragraphs, paragraphs into chapters and chapters into books.  It is an imaginative and virtual Lego, with marvellous and wondrous worlds, if not universes, conjured therefrom. Then, to be able to communicate ideas clearly or compose stories, frightening or sustaining, but always riveting, would be a marvellous and added pleasure.  This brings me to one of my favourite contemporary philosophers, Professor A.C. Grayling (b. 1949), who is a master in such virtual Lego building. He is the author of more than thirty books that are wide-ranging within the field of philosophy and indeed outside that specialist field.  He also must have written thousands of articles in newspapers on a multitude of topics.  I first came across him through reading "The Last Word" column in The Guardian.  He wrote that column for several years (1999–2002) and was a regular contributor to its "Comment is free" section.  He also wrote for a multitude of other papers, journals and magazines like The Times, Prospect Magazine, Financial Times, New Statesman and Observer to name just a selection of the many.  My younger self was much overawed by his voluminous output and my older incarnation remains particularly envious of his prodigious talent.  He was Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London, where he taught from 1991.  Then, being a man of amazing educational vision, he founded in 2011 and became the first Master of New College of the Humanities (now Northeastern University London), an independent undergraduate college in that city. His political affiliations lie on the centre-left, and he has defended human rights and politically liberal values in print and by activism. He is associated in Britain with other New Atheists who advocate that religious belief is irrational, dangerous, and should be countered by science and rational argument.  The main atheists in this group would be Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel Dennett. Grayling frequently appears in British media discussing philosophy and public affairs. I have just finished reading his challenging and provoking book: For the Good of the World: Why our Planet’s Crises need Global Agreement Now (2022, One World).

The main characteristic of all Grayling’s work is clarity of expression.  He meets the acid test laid down by Einstein that no matter how complex a subject, the experts in it should be able to express it simply for the general public, otherwise, they do not understand their subject well enough.  The three biggest challenges in the world today, according to the author, are climate change, the ballooning of technology, which, with the rapid advancement in AI, has the potential to stunt our humanity and finally the lack of justice in the world.  He argues that, given the negative consequences of these three factors, which at their worst will result in our complete extinction as a species, we must work together in deliberate and genuine harmony to agree on a set of values that will allow us to confront these horrific repercussions.  I will dwell only on the first of these three challenges to our collective future, namely, climate change, as I believe it’s the most pressing challenge of the three.

Given the current geopolitical situation in the world, this call to deliberate and genuine harmony, or “Global Agreement Now” as he states it in his title, sounds like a faint voice calling in the wilderness.  Not that Grayling is an idealist or utopian.  In fact, he is very much a realist and presents the consequences of our inaction on all three points as nothing short of catastrophic for humanity.  His realism is summed up nicely in an eponymous law, namely Grayling’s Law, a law that can be stated in two parts, the main part and its corollary.  This law serves as the very centre of gravity of his argument, because the acknowledgement and understanding of it should be our spur to activity to save us from probable destruction. This law and its corollary root us in realism: 1. Anything that CAN be done WILL be done if it brings advantage or profit to those who can do it. 2. Corollary: What CAN be done will NOT be done if it brings costs, economic or otherwise, to those who can stop it. This law, with corollary, succinctly brings to light why we have never, as a united and global force, tackled the climate, AI and injustice crises, and why all three will only be overcome by a united effort.

Following the main principle of Grayling’s Law, despite fossil fuels creating climate chaos, and technology companies threatening algorithmic extinction (AE), both industries continue to focus on their civilisation-threatening products, because they can, that is, through successfully lobbying politicians, they can attract trillions in subsidies and go on to earn billions in profits.

The consequence of the corollary effectively means that all the things that governments could do to rein in fossil fuel companies and technology companies won’t be done, because governments are being lobbied by these industries to prevent any stringent regulations.  Politicians simply do not wish to take on the might of either the fossil fuel industry or the technological industry. As such, society has been brought to the point of catastrophe.  In short, to put the situation in basic terms, it is greed that is the motivating factor.  Grayling quotes a rather wise if depressing statement from Ben Ehrenreich: “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism” (p. 32), a statement which reflects the depth and strength of human greed and rapaciousness.  In reality, the ordinary worker in the economy is bent only on survival and consequently thinks and operates on a short-term basis and not on a long-term one that envisages the quality of life of future generations.  Politicians, tycoons, oligarchs and multinational corporations are all cognisant of this fact and use it very much to their advantage. Moreover, I like the concreteness and realism of Grayling in the following sharp statement: “To put matters bluntly: collective suicide is currently and actually in progress: the intervention required to prevent or moderate it is beyond urgent” (p. 12).

Some of the dark, realistic facts he underlines are the following, which I have selected randomly: (i) 85% of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions have been pumped into the atmosphere after World War II. Worryingly, emissions since 1990 account for 50% of those in the atmosphere (p. 15). (ii) On current warming trends, it is predicted that by 2050 up to 20 million people will be rendered homeless in Bangladesh alone (p. 17). Even Spain, Italy and Greece are set for permanent drought by 2100 (p. 21).  (iv) 1 million species of animals, and 40% of plant species face extinction.  Against this background, Grayling does suggest what actions must be taken by the world working in harmony, a lot of them aspirational or mere wishful thinking, unfortunately, given today’s geopolitical climate. The following are some of the positive musings of Professor Grayling: (i) Our hope lies rooted in the vitality and wisdom of our youth and such activists as Greta Thunberg. (ii)  We must educate, educate, educate.  (iii) “Changing the system requires systemic change” (p. 27 – 28). (iv) He writes that we must elect governments that will act, and remove those which won’t.  (v) Governments must work together; global cooperation is imperative. (vi) He recommends lobbying politicians, joining activist groups, and participating in demonstrations and so on (p. 37 – 39). (vii) We must educate ourselves in basic ethics; in other words, we must wake up to the fact that it’s wrong to leave a badly damaged planet for future generations to try and rectify, indeed, to attempt to live a healthy life thereon (p. 43 and following). (viii) Furthermore, he poses a stark question to wake us up, that is, whether it is at all the right thing to do to have children, given what the future holds for them.

As individuals, as nations and as a global community, we must, of necessity, come up with shared values.  Undoubtedly, this will require Herculean effort, given the current geopolitical situation.  It is disillusioning to see the rather rapid erosion of democratic values with the rise of fascism in the U.S.A., which was once the guarantor and highest court of appeal with regard to those values.  In a world where there is no highest court of appeal, no one to give credence to those values or enforce laws that defend them, we are all left adrift on an ocean of chaos and veritable destruction where the truth becomes nothing more than what any one person says it is, where the possibility of shared values becomes ever more remote.  Indeed, as the book was written in 2022, the author was not aware that Trump would be inaugurated a second time as President of the USA and that chaos would be unleashed at home and abroad at such an unprecedented pace. Speaking only of Trump’s first term, Grayling states that “his presence in the White House was certainly a gain to the fossil fuel industry and a setback to the world’s climate” (p. 27). His analysis now, I’m sure, would be much bleaker and darker.

In the last section of the book, suitably titled “Solution,” Grayling avers that “a key component of ensuring genuine democracy is the voting system…. that should fully reflect the spread of inferences and preferences among the enfranchised” (p. 192 – 193).  To this extent, he also recommends a proportional electoral system as being better to represent this contention than a “first-past-the-post” system.  He argues cogently that the latter disenfranchise large numbers of any population (p. 193 – 194). With regards the third major challenge to the planet, the absence of justice and rights, Grayling argues that their absence is the very reason in the first place that the inevitable Grayling’s Law exists and operates with impunity.  The following question and answer quotation, italicised by the author himself, is worth quoting by way of concluding this review, as it summarises in a nutshell the wake-up call and the necessary action required to save our planet from almost inevitable extinction.  Are we lazy enough, indifferent enough and above all, selfish enough to let such a fate befall our little brittle blue planet? Can there be a system of universal values that all could share, enabling global cooperation to deal with global threats?  The answer is YES; it is the framework of human rights.” (p. 197) This, according to Grayling, relies on a genuine democracy being achieved on a global scale (p. 198). His concluding sentence is frightening for those of us who take global warming seriously, namely that reality will impose “a vastly greater and perhaps fatal cost” (p. 199) on an uncaring and indifferent geopolitical world, and sweep all human life away with it.