Customer Reviews

Optimism One: The Emerging Radicalism

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I flunked English in 10th grade & had to make it up in summer school. The teacher's assignment: go to the school's library, read some books and write book reports. Among the ones I found: Orwell's Essays, Ettinger's "Man into Superman," Jerome Tuccille's "It Usually Begins with Ayn Rand," (funny!!) and this book by Esfandiary (who later renamed himself F.M. 2030). I did pretty well by flunking that course....and sometimes wonder about the mysterious benefactor who had smuggled such revolutionary stuff into a high school library in 1973.

Esfandiary's basic point is that progress is good and should continue. From his third-world perspective he pillories western romanticism about the third world (which wants, desperately and rightly, to be more like us) and pessimism about technology. He urges us out of complacency with our current state. We should take hold of the tools we've got and overcome mortality, for instance. The book helped me to shed some remnants and acknowledge: complacent and backward-looking pessimism in all its modern guises is crap.