Moral Ambition

‘This is not a self-help book,’ declares Rutger Bregman at the get-go. Well. Yes and no. The Dutch historian, journalist and author certainly favours the style and tone of the self-help oeuvre: the ebullient voice, the quirky anecdote, the counterintuitive insight (You thought it was X! But actually it’s Y!). But also no, because as he adds in his opening remarks, this book won’t make your life easier or help you feel good about yourself. On the contrary.

In Moral Ambition, Bregman is urging readers to do the hard things, to put the communal good ahead of the personal, and to look critically at the assumptions we make about the world, the economy, politics, and human nature – including our own choices.

Bregman opened for business with his book Utopia for Realists, in which he made a powerful case for a Universal Basic Income. The title also stands as a kind of guidepost to his general philosophy: he’s an optimist, but a clear-eyed one, firmly grounded in reality. His second book, Humankind, revisited the ‘evidence’ that humans are selfish brutes motivated primarily by self-interest (from the notorious Stanford experiments to a real-life Lord of the Flies) and found it wanting. Turns out, we are essentially collaborative and compassionate – for evolutionary reasons, if nothing else.

In his latest work, he brings both that faith in human nature and that factual deep dive to a specific project: to urge us all to have more moral ambition; to get active in the world, in whatever way we can, to make the world a better place.

Bregman loves a graph and a footnote (sometimes a little too much) and not everyone will love his evangelical tone, but the sermon is leavened with a dry sense of humour and genuine realpolitik. The result is – as he promises – challenging, thought-provoking, and often deeply uncomfortable. In a good way.