A fellow journalist, Barrie Lees, has written in pessimistic vein to tell me that my plans for A 21st Century Renaissance (April 2 2025) are unrealistic, or indeed forlorn (see comment number 7). Here’s my response:
Dear Barrie,
I’m not saying the Renaissance will in any sense be easy. I am merely saying it is necessary – if we, humanity, seriously would like and intend to occupy the planet in a tolerable state for more than a few more decades (at most), and to share it with our fellow creatures (or at least a fair proportion of the ones that are still with us, and their dependents).
My contention is that we (humanity) could, in theory, reach what I am suggesting should be our Goal (“Convivial society, personal fulfilment and a flourishing biosphere”) if we really put our minds to it, and if we directed all our techniques and technologies towards that end; and installed a suitable (“appropriate”) infrastructure (governance, the economy, and laws) that would enable us to do so; and cultivated an appropriate mindset to underpin and drive the whole enterprise — a mindset rooted in the moral principles of compassion and humility, and properly embraced the key concept of Oneness.
All this, of course, is a series of very big IFs; and I agree with you that the chances of the necessary metamorphosis coming about – and doing so in the next few years, for the clock is ticking – seem slight. Right now the world is embroiled in a whole swathe of huge and horrible wars (all war is horrible but the present cruelties beggar belief) and all thoughts of rescuing the world from meltdown have in effect been put on hold. The antics of the world’s most influential “leaders” (Trump, Putin, Netanyahu etc etc) make it even harder than it is bound to be to address or even seriously to discuss the world’s biggest and perennial problems — the kind now fashionably known as “existential”: whether we can continue to exist at all in a tolerable form. The icing on the cake, or the coup de grace, is the failure of many people in positions of influence even to acknowledge that there are problems, or to acknowledge the nature of the problems. There are still climate-change deniers in positions of influence for goodness’ sake – and some scientists and other intellectuals (including alumni and alumnae of some of the world’s most prestigious and well-endowed centres of learning) who lend support to the deniers, with all manner of ingenious but spurious argument.
So there are three layers of difficulty: the magnitude and urgency of the world’s problems; the immediate difficulties (including wars and pending economic collapse) that make it difficult or impossible even to focus on the even bigger, long-term (“existential”) issues; and the failure even to recognise that there are bigger problems that need far more serious attention than they are receiving.
So yes indeed: in the light of all this, pessimism seems the only “reasonable”, or “rational”, stance.
But still, I suggest, we should keep hope alive. Hope does not imply belief that things will turn out well, as Julian of Norwich envisaged in the late 14th century in her Revelations of Divine Love:
“And thus our good Lord answered to all the questions and doubts that I might make, saying full comfortably: I may make all thing well, I can make all thing well, I will make all thing well, and I shall make all thing well; and thou shalt see thyself that all manner of thing shall be well.”
Hope, rather, is the thought and feeling that things could turn out well, if only we thought and acted appropriately. There may be little or no “rational” reason for such hope – but hope nonetheless is a sine qua non. That is, if we continue to hope, and keep plugging away, then there is still a small chance that we could pull through, and head for what Churchill and others called “the sunlit uplands”. But if we stop hoping, and stop trying, then we really will have had our chips. In the late 19th century Emily Dickinson put the matter beautifully:
“Hope is the thing with feathers/That perches in the soul/And sings the tune without words/That never stops at all
And sweetest in the gale is heard/And sore must be the storm/That could abash the little bird/That kept so many warm.
I’ve heard it in the chillest land/And on the strangest sea;/
Yet, never, in extremity/ It asked a crumb of me.”
And although hope, like all such attitudes and emotions, is not in itself a product of purely “rational” thinking, there are nonetheless good reasons to hope, despite all the signs to the contrary. In particular:
1: We do have the technological means to rescue the world. That is, we could do it if we really tried, and acted concertedly. This seems very unlikely to happen in a world that seeks above all to compete, as ruthlessly as it takes, for material wealth and dominance. But at least it is possible. Meltdown is not yet inevitable, or unavoidable.
2: Many millions of people are already on the case. The many millions range from figures like Noam Chomsky and the Dalai Lama (and many more in less prominent roles), to dedicated teachers and healthcare workers and carers and clerics and farmers and ecologists and so on and so on who take it for granted that their task in life is to help make the world a better place, and allow what Abraham Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature” to come to the fore, and do what they do accordingly. If only the people who want the world to be better and are doing good and appropriate things communicated with each other and cohered more than they do, there would indeed be a critical mass that would shove the Trumps, Musks, Putins, and Netanyahus of this world to the margins, to join the ranks of those sad but dedicated old codgers who tread the streets with sandwich boards that tell us to mend our ways.
3: People are basically good. Generations of prophets and intellectuals including writers and philosophers and some prominent post-Darwinian biologists have queued up over these past few thousand years to tell us that we, human beings, are a bad lot: inveterately self-centred and therefore selfish; venal; out for the main chance; treacherous; and generally untrustworthy. All of us, after all, are children of nature: and nature, as Lord Tennyson all too resonantly remarked, is “red in tooth and claw”. Unless we, humanity, individually and collectively, are prepared to be red in tooth and claw too, then we will be swept aside. It’s a pity, maybe, but that’s the way life is. Only strong government can keep our unpleasantness under wraps, as Plato argued; for as Thomas Hobbes put the matter in Leviathan, 2000 years or so after Plato, people in a state of nature, without strong government to keep us in check, are doomed to live in –
“… continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
Yet as Darwin well knew, and the Russian Darwinian biologist Peter Kropotkin in particular emphasised, life is at least as cooperative as it is competitive – for if it were not so, life would be impossible. And as modern biologists like the late Frans de Waal has helped to show and has argued in many a tome, animals of all kinds often act unselfishly, often risking death to save others who may be total strangers, and indeed not even of the same species. I have written several blogs on all this, including The biology of compassion: work in progress, 13 June 2024: Life is a master class in cooperativeness, 17 June 2024; and The battle for Darwin’s soul, 22 July 2024. Indeed there is very good reason to feel that the 14-year-old Anne Frank hit the nail on the head when she wrote in her diary in 1941, as she and her family hid from the Gestapo in a Dutch attic,
“…in spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.”
To be fair to Plato, too, the strong governance that he envisaged was a million miles from Messrs Trump and Vance, or Putin or Netanyahu or Xi Jinping, or even from the “strong and stable” government that our own dear Theresa May promised us so passionately and so often. Rather, via Socrates in The Republic, Plato envisaged leaders as “philosopher-kings”, combining the qualities of intellect, scholarship, and saintliness. The philosopher-kings, said Plato/Socrates, must inter alia be celibate, for family ties would raise the possibility of nepotism. They should also eschew all personal possessions, so that ownership to them became an alien concept; for then they could not be corrupted, at least by the promise of merely material wealth. Boris Johnson read classics at Oxford and may even have read The Republic in the original, if indeed original texts still exist. But the sense of it seems to have escaped him. As indeed it has evidently escaped most politicians and world leaders, assuming they are familiar with Plato at all. (The other leading politician I’m aware of who read classics (at Cambridge) was Enoch Powell. So much for the traditional idea that the classics are the door to wisdom.)
My point is, though, that Anne Frank wrote in hope, even in the most hopeless of circumstances; and that hope is a sine qua non, for once we give up hope we are lost; and that “in spite of everything” there was and is some reason to be hopeful. In particular, the harmonious world that’s needed is, surely, what most people would prefer. Only psychopaths could possibly prefer the strife and destruction that the present-day mindset has led us to. Unfortunately, as several modern studies have shown, the dominant classes in all walks of life including commerce and government do include a greater than average proportion of psychopaths. Trump, Putin, and Netanyahu are archetypes. The reasons for this are very obvious, as is discussed in this website in Idiots and Gangsters (12 January 2023) and inWhy are governments so bad?(14 December 2023). To achieve high office you need seriously to want high office. The lure of status must outweigh the simpler desire just to chill out and to get on with your own life. Psychopaths seek wealth and status more than most of us do, and ambition all too often overrides deficiencies of talent.
In short: I agree there aren’t many grounds for hope. The nature and depths of the world’s problems are not properly analysed or recognised. The people with the most power are looking the other way. They are too busy chasing the various bees in their own bonnets, and in any case are hopelessly unsuited to the task in hand.
Yet there’s a plus side too. The ideas and attitudes we need are all out there. There is, at least among people at large, no shortage of good will. What’s mainly lacking is coherence of thought and action, and mobilisation. The key, perhaps – or certainly a key – is democracy. Democracy after all by definition should reflect the will of the people, and if people really are as Anne Frank said, “good at heart”, then the will of the people should provide what’s needed. We should have more faith in ourselves.
So maybe there isn’t much hope. But what there is, is surely worth keeping alive. The embers might still be breathed back to life.
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