However, when Manson began to offer solutions to the problems he had identified early on, I found much of it compelling – though at one point I thought he was actually going to go as far as deploying the expression that I often use when watching England teams play sport, ‘I can cope with the despair; it’s the hope that gets me down.’  But fortunately, he didn’t.

There were some useful summaries of the philosophers that Manson has identified as the genuinely game-changing thinkers in history such as Plato, Kant and Nietzsche.  I have struggled over the years to get to grips with philosophical concepts, probably because I was traumatised by having to do a paper on political thought through the ages when I was at university and I never really understood any of it.  Perhaps in my retirement I will find the time and the willpower to engage with such ideas in more depth – or perhaps I’ll just read fictional thrillers about serial killers. 

It would be an interesting exercise to put Mark Manson and Jason Hickel in a room.  The latter’s book ‘Less is More’ was highlighted last week because it promoted an anti-growth agenda and a move away from capitalism to something much less destructive to our planet.  Manson, on the other hand, is much more willing to embrace the benefits that have come to us in the last several hundred years as we have moved away from the straitjacket of religious dogma towards a greater willingness to see science as the predominant guiding force in our world.

For example, I thought he made some excellent points about the relationship between science and religion, saying that science is arguably the most effective of all religions because it is able to evolve and improve upon itself, which religion often struggles to do.  Science is open to anybody and everybody, and it is not moored to a single book or creed.  It is not beholden to some agent, land or people and it is not tethered to a supernatural spirit whose existence cannot be proven or disproven.  It is an ongoing, ever-changing body of evidence-based beliefs, one that is free to mutate, grow and shift as the evidence dictates.

The scientific revolution, he tells us, changed the world more than anything before or since.  It has reshaped the planet, lifted billions out of disease and poverty, and improved every aspect of life.  Manson says that it is not an exaggeration to suggest that science may be the only demonstrably good thing humanity has ever done for itself and he describes Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton as Titans, according science with the singular responsibility for all the greatest inventions and advances in human history, from medicine and agriculture to education and commerce.

But science, he argues, did something even more spectacular: it introduced the world to the concept of growth.  For most of human history, the idea of economic growth was not a thing.  Change occurred so slowly that everyone died in pretty much the same financial condition in which they were born.  The average human from two thousand years ago experienced about as much growth in their lifetime as we experience in six months today.  People would live out their entire lives and nothing changed – no new developments, inventions or technologies.  People would live and die on the same land, among the same people, using the same tools, and nothing ever got better.  In fact, things like plague and famine and war and idiot rulers with large armies often made everything worse.  It was a slow, gruelling and miserable existence.  Having read a lot of history books in my lifetime, I can certainly testify to the validity of these points – though we can still see plenty of plague, famine, war and idiot rulers with large armies today, despite all the progress.

With no prospect for change or a better life during their time on Earth, Manson describes how people drew their hope from spiritual promises of a better experience in the next lifetime, which is a key reason why religions flourished and dominated daily life.  Everything revolved around the church – or synagogue or temple or mosque.  Priests and holy men were the arbiters of social life because they were the arbiters of hope.  They were the only ones who could tell you what God wanted, and God was the only one who could promise any salvation or a better future.  Therefore, these holy men dictated everything that was of value in society.

Then, somewhere around 1500, science began to happen and everything, in Manson’s words, ‘went crazy’.  Microscopes and printing presses and internal combustion engines and cotton gins and thermometers and, finally, though not really until the 1920s with the discovery of penicillin, some medicine that actually worked.  Suddenly – well, relatively suddenly – life got better.  More importantly, you could see life getting better.  People used better tools, had access to more food, were healthier and made more money.  Finally, the author says, you could look back ten years and say, ‘Whoa!  Can you believe we used to live like that?’  And that ability to look back and see progress, to see growth happen, changed how people viewed the future.  It changed how they viewed themselves – forever.

Manson tells us that you did not now have to wait until death to improve your lot.  You could improve it here and now.  And this implied all sorts of wonderful things.  Freedom, for one – how were you going to choose to grow today?  But also responsibility – because you could now control your own destiny, you had to take responsibility for that destiny.  And of course, equality – because if a big patriarchal God is not dictating who deserves what, that must mean that either no one deserves anything or everyone deserves everything.  ‘Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité’, anyone?  Or a bit of Karl Marx’s class war, perhaps? 

These were new concepts that had never been voiced before.  With the prospect of so much growth and change in this life, people no longer relied on spiritual beliefs about the next life to give them hope, which changed everything.  Church doctrines softened.  People stayed at home on Sundays.  Monarchs conceded power to their subjects.  Philosophers openly began to question God – and somehow were not burned alive for doing so.  It was a golden age for human thought and progress. 

Manson concludes his thoughts on this topic by saying that the progress begun in that age has only accelerated and continues to accelerate to this day, which is not an unreasonable point to make.  However, Hickel’s argument is that the initial benefits of this progress have now been hijacked by the forces of capitalism, which have turned the gains of previous growth into the harm of overzealous exploitation of both people and natural resources.  It would be interesting to watch them debate their ideas, though it is of course entirely possible that both their arguments are correct.