More Ian Morris: It's not who wins, but whether the game matters.

Daniel Bell's book, the End of Ideology, was popular when I was young. The general idea was that prosperity and technilogical advances had made all this left-right ideology unnecessary and beside the point. Then, every one got excited about politics in the sixties and I decided that Bell must have been wrong.

Morris' book (which I have now finished) makes me wonder if maybe Bell was right, after all. I would miss celebrating the 19th Century radicals like Debs and Haywood, but if the pie is growing as fast as Morris believes, worrying about politics is a waste of everyone's time. We should all just make sure that as many of us as possible have the most advanced technology available and scarcities will disappear. The idea would not be to find a fair distribution of property for the poor, but just make sure everyone could get his or her hands on the lastest computer to be implanted in the brain or gene modifier or energy producer or super grains; then the meaning of "poor" evaporates.

Hey, I'm tired of politics anyway, so this will be fine with me.

Morris ends his book with a Kipling poem. Just like David Allen Coe's perfect country and western song with drunks and prisons and trains in it, a great history should end with a Kipling poem. Maybe it should have started with a poem by Robert Service, but I was thrilled to get to then end and find, "Oh, East is east and West is west..."