2016, St. Martin’s Press, 304 pages

Back Blurb

Two award-winning Oxford scholars redefine the present day as a new Renaissance–a rare moment of flourishing genius and risk that promises to reshape all our lives. Da Vinci, Columbus, Copernicus, Luther, Gutenberg. These names recall an era in which an unprecedented rush of discovery and disruption broke through long-standing barriers and broke down equally long-standing powers. This rush entangled the whole world politically, economically and intellectually, and reshaped society. Now, the same forces that converged 500 years ago to spark genius and upend social order–great leaps in science, trade, migration, technology, education and health–are once again present, only stronger and more widespread.

In Age of Discovery, Ian Goldin and Chris Kutarna show how we can draw courage and wisdom from the last Renaissance in order to fashion our own golden age out of this New Renaissance. Whether we’re seized by Gutenberg or Zuckerberg; the discovery of the Americas or the rise of China; copperplate or silicon etching; the Bonfire of the Vanities or the rise of ISIS; the spread of syphilis or the Ebola pandemic–a Renaissance moment dares humanity to give its best just when the stakes are highest.

Age of Discovery navigates the crises of our time and helps us all define a legacy that the world will still remember half a millennium from now.

Author Blurbs

Ian Goldin is a Professor of Globalization and Director of the Oxford Martin School at the University of Oxford. He was Vice President of the World Bank, Chief Executive of the Development Bank of Southern Africa and an adviser to President Nelson Mandela.

Chris Kutarna is a Fellow at the Oxford Martin School and an expert on international politics and economics. He was a strategy consultant at the Boston Consulting Group and continues to advise senior executives in Asia, North America and Europe.

The New Renaissance

The first thing that caught my eye wasn’t the Goldin and Kutarna’s exciting thesis that we live in a New Renaissance, but rather, that a book from two Oxford academics would eschew the Oxford comma. This I noticed in the author blurb (see author blurb on Kutarana above): “He was a strategy consultant at the Boston Consulting Group and continues to advise senior executives in Asia, North America and Europe.” Notice no Oxford comma between “North America and Europe.” But if you look at the text inside the book, sometimes the hallowed Oxford comma is there, and sometimes not!–for example, page 129 reads:

Entrepreneurs have made a synthetic version with processes borrowed from the semiconductor industry, and as they tweak it, “gecko tape” will find uses in defense (all-terrain robots), manufacturing (replacing many screws, rivets and glues), and even athletics (fumble-free gloves for American football players).

In this passage, notice no Oxford comma between “rivets and glues” but an Oxford comma is there between “defense, and even athletics.” And then there is also a new device of what I guess can be called the “Oxford semicolon” to separate a list of items. This from page 166:

Chapter Two touched on how the same infrastructure, networks and investments that connect us also make it easier to coordinate crime and violence; disseminate hate; train up would-up hackers, fraudsters and bombers; and trade every illicit good from drugs to fake IDs to child slaves.

So there is a semicolon separating “bombers; and trade every illicit good.” But now compare this passage with the book blurb (printed in its entirety above):

Whether we’re seized by Gutenberg or Zuckerberg; the discovery of the Americas or the rise of China; copperplate or silicon etching; the Bonfire of the Vanities or the rise of ISIS; the spread of syphilis or the Ebola pandemic–a Renaissance moment dares humanity to give its best just when the stakes are highest.

Notice no “Oxford semicolon” separating “syphilis or the Ebola pandemic.” And then, going back to the Oxford comma, notice in the quote from page 166 (above) that there is no Oxford comma between “networks and investments.”

So it appears that the writer of the author blurbs and the book blurb (who doesn’t use the Oxford comma and the so-called “Oxford semicolon”) must be different than the book writers, who do use the Oxford comma and the so-called “Oxford semicolon.” But then again, inside the text of the book itself, sometimes you find the Oxford comma and sometimes you don’t. Is this because the book has two writers, Goldin and Kutarna? That’s one possibility. But the problem with that hypothesis is that even in the same passage (for example the passage quoted from page 129) it’s inconsistent. This inconsistency I found rather interesting and almost added to the pleasure of reading the book.

Great Quotes!

Chapter 9 kicks off with a great quote that’s traditionally attributed to Michelangelo:

If people knew how hard I had to work to gain my mastery, it would not seem so wonderful at all.

Hard to resist a chuckle on reading that. I don’t know enough about Michelangelo to conjecture whether he would have said that, but I do know that painting the ceiling of the Sistine chapel was a debilitating exercise for him. I’d like to believe he said that, as it shows that he had a sense of humour.

For everyone wondering whether we live in an age of unprecedented manufactured risks, here’s a powerful quote from page 4:

Scientists alive today outnumber all scientists who ever lived up to 1980.

Scientists push the envelope. And when they push the envelope, sometimes unintended consequences result. So, it stands that, if there’s more scientists alive today poking the bear than there ever have been in human history, something is going to happen. And that ‘something’ is likely going to be something unexpected.

The Unexpected

Now, my favourite topic: the unexpected. Goldin and Kutarna have written a great book comparing our age to the Renaissance. For example, the Renaissance had Gutenberg. We have the internet. The Renaissance had Columbus sailing to the New World. We have globalization. I like that. Of course, I also wonder whether Goldin and Kutarna could have made a similar argument for any thirty or fifty year period since, say, 1800. It seems that the pace of human development has really picked up steam since the Industrial Revolution.

But, getting back to the unexpected. Goldin and Kutarna identify possible dangers to our modern-day Renaissance: bioterror epidemics, the rise of ISIS and other fringe movements, inequality, and climate change, to name a few. But really, what age in the past has been brought down or cut short by what it had seen coming? Look, for example, at the Great Depression. In the Roaring Twenties, the last thing the prognosticators were predicting was a Great Depression. The stock market, to the pundits of the time (including famed Yale economist Irving) “had reached a permanent high plateau.” Almost immediately after Irving said that, the stock market collapsed. The dangers that we can see coming we will work around. I call that human ingenuity. It is what we don’t know that will hurt us. Or, in other words, unexpected events.

I’ll leave you with that thought. Until next time, I’m Edwin Wong and I’m doing Melpomene’s work.