Linked inTwitter

The 52:52:52 project, launching both on this site and on social media in early 2024 will help you address 52 issues with 52 responses over 52 weeks.

A Mundane Comedy is Dominic Kelleher's new book, which will be published in mid 2024. The introduction is available here and further extracts will appear on this site and on social media in the coming months.

This site addresses what's changing, in our own lives, in our organisations, and in wider society. You'll learn about key changes across more than 150 areas, ranging from ageing and time, through nature and animals, to kindness and love...and very much else inbetween.

Halcyon's aim is to help you reflect on how you can better deal with related change in your own life.

Civility

On Pragmatism

Images

Is it a wrong approach, as one leading journalist claimed, to start with your favourite quality or value (freedom, equality, justice etc), and then try to imagine what a society would look like if it were arranged to maximise that quality? 

Should we, instead, examine the political and cultural institutions we already have and work from there, as failure to do this might lead to incoherence and fantasy?

Imagining tapping the untapped potential...

...of civil society and the individuals within it.  Perhaps this is a more hopeful way of addressing the current economic crisis than much of what we get through the mainstream media.  If we listen more to the surviving members of the "make do and mend" generation that got through the 1930s, WWII and its bleak aftermath, maybe we can learn again not just self-sufficiency, but also a way of pulling together towards a common purpose?

Quote 406

Without civic morality, communities perish; without personal morality, their survival has no value - Bertrand Russell (English mathematician and philosopher, 1872-1970)

Quote 405

What may overturn the West?s liberal civilisation is not the very few who hate it, but the vast majority of Westerners who are indifferent to their heritage. Americans and Europeans created a fantastic civilisation on the back of optimism, science, individualism, liberalism, economic growth, and Christian compassion. We are losing faith in these touchstones, even in true personal liberty and social equality. Without belief in ourselves and our civilisation, we have no need of external enemies to seal our fate - Richard Koch , co-author of Suicide of the West

Quote 404

We've progressed from a society of farmers to a society of factory workers to a society of knowledge workers. And now we're progressing yet again - to a society of creators and empathisers, pattern recognisers, and meaning makers - Daniel Pink, http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.02/brain.html

Quote 403

The world no longer has a choice between force and law; if civilisation is to survive, it must choose the rule of law - Dwight D. Eisenhower

Quote 402

The true civilisation is where every man gives to every other every right he claims for himself - Robert Ingersoll (U.S. lawyer and orator, 1833-1899)

Quote 401

The preservation of the Earth and the safety and happiness of humanity must have priority over any nation, any ideology, any system and any religion - Robert Muller

Quote 399

Open societies - people act on basis of biased views but learn from experience and there is a critical process at work that tends to correct the bias so that while perfect knowledge remains unattainable, there is at least a tendency for thinking and reality to come closer together (101-02) Solid: Closed societies (Iran, Soviet Union) suffer from "static disequilibrium" - changes in the real world cannot change the unbending dogma. Gaseous: at the other end, things change so quickly that there are unintended consequences and events spin out of the participants' control (French, Industrial and comms/Internet revolutions all examples - DK) - leading to regime change - George Soros, The Crisis of Global Capitalism: Open Society Endangered