Life, Liberty, and Happiness: 

An Optimist Manifesto

by

Frank S. Robinson

This is the recap by Guenther Langner, of a talk given at the October 8th, 2006 CDHS monthly meeting.

At the October meeting, CDHS member Frank Robinson talked about his just-published book, Life, Liberty, and Happiness, an Optimist Manifesto.

His book was honored with the Spooner Award for advancing the literature of liberty. Frank, a graduate of the NYU Law School, served for twenty-six years as an Administrative Law Judge for the New York Public Service Commission, and then turned his hobby of collecting world and ancient coins into a coin business. More about his book can be found on his website www.fsrcoin.com/x.html

Frank started out by telling us how he came to write this book. Prompted by a suggestion by his wife (the poet and also CDHS-member Therese Broderick), it was originally conceived as a collection of letters from a father to his at-that-time ten-year-old daughter Elizabeth. He kept thinking about it, including new ideas, and constantly examining and analyzing what it is that he really believes and if these beliefs could stand up to critical examination and could be defended. It grew to a full-size book within about three years.

The author is convinced that this book is a humanistic book in the literal sense. He says he loves people, which he cannot say of many who claim to be humanist. The main idea he wants to get across is optimism, for two reasons: one, he is an optimistic person; and secondly because of the facts of the world – namely, that looking at the greater picture, things have got better over time and people, generally, are living better. Why, he asks, does pessimism still widely prevail? One reason, he thinks, is the failure to count our blessings, people live better but they do not feel better. He found an explanation in The Paradox of Choice, a book in which author Berry Schwartz who made what he termed the adaptation effect (‘getting used to...’) responsible for this situation.

Frank went on to tell us that his book promotes a basic philosophy which is summed up in the phrase “live and let live”. The “live” part concerns our own lives, the only one we ever get and it is a tremendously precious gift. The “let-live” part concerns how we relate to other people, and means let other people live their lives according to their choices and dictates. He is convinced that a great part of the problems in the world stem from the unwillingness to allow other people to choose their own path in life. He decided to remain neutral with regard to religion and leave it out, except where it is intertwined with other topics he wanted to discuss.

To give us a flavor of the book itself, Frank read to us the first paragraph of the introduction:

“We all know the bleak litany: humankind is beastly; hatred, violence and war are bred in the bone; man’s inhumanity to man; ignorance, bigotry, oppression, exploitation, overpopulation; a sick society perverting nature, a materialistic capitalistic economy controlled by evil corporations; the rich get richer while the poor get poorer; we are killing ourselves with pollution and wantonly destroying our planet. We hear it endlessly. And it’s so wrongheaded.”

He tells us, we live in a time of transition between different paradigms of life, which is very difficult and rocky, and hard to handle, but Frank believes that this change is positive and in the long run the forces of ignorance and superstition cannot stand against the forces of science and truth.

Frank then read from chapter 25 (The book has an introduction and 35 chapters), titled Why the Gloom and Doom Crowd is Wrong. The full text of the chapter can, of course, not be repeated here, but the main points can be summarized thus:

* Up to the beginning of the twentieth century the trendlines of life expectancy and personal wealth were almost horizontal for thousands of years. In the twentieth century the life expectancy has increased significantly and the income in dollar value has increased five-fold. This is true not only for the Western industrialized nations but for the whole world.

* The predictions of Malthus and Marx were wrong because they did not and could not, at their time, count foresee the progress in science and technology, medicine and agriculture. There has never been a static pie which had to be divided over a growing population – the pie got bigger faster than the population.

* More people have become more affluent, and this will continue. Since more affluent people tend to have fewer children, population growth will come to a halt (It has been estimated that a peak of nine billion will be reached by mid-century).

* The number of war deaths in proportion to the population has decreased and was the lowest ever in the twentieth century despite the horrible wars in the first half.

* Advances have been made in freedom and democracy. There are now more democracies than ever before.

* There is no way that this progress does not affect the environment (Otherwise we would still be at the stage of cavemen). Non-renewable resources will diminish, but all predictions so far have been proven wrong. If the oil-reserves estimates of 1970 would have proven correct, we would have run out long before 2000. Human ingenuity will have discovered or created substitutes long before a resource will no longer be available.

* One cannot prevent developing populous nations from striving for the same standard of living we are used to. They will not have to be fed from a static pie but, since they contribute productive people, the pie will grow with them.

* There are unavoidable environmental costs, but people value their environment, they like clean air and water. The stewardship of our planet is getting better, not worse.

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