Halcyon Imagines

Is it a wrong approach, as claimed recently, 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?

Not sure...just because most "-isms" are divisive and fail ultimately, should we really give up on all big ideas and hopes of breakthrough change in favour of sheer pragmatism?

(picture source: thinkso.com)

...which might be just as well!

Halcyon's work is centred on values, but as in any other area of life, it's good to get the occasional reminder not to take oneselves too seriously...

Some call it The Shift, others call it Blessed Unrest, and still others talk of a "civilian surge" - the idea that around the world people who have hugely different access to opportunities and wealth nonetheless inhabit an increasingly common environment in which mobile and other emerging technologies can tell protestors and poor farmers and street kids about how various aspects of their life could be improved.

The UK Royal Society of Arts' new mission seeks to combine "thought leadership, social engagement and innovative forms of collaboration". In short, the RSA is now calling for nothing less than a "21st century enlightenment".

Clay Shirky, in Edge and at Demos talk about our surplus, unused brainpower, and what we might be able to do with it if we turn off our TVs.

"Humans have many more options before them than they currently believe, but what to do with too much information is a great riddle of our time", says Theodore Zeldin.

The concept of nudging has been in vogue recently, with its notions of "choice architecture" and gently pushing people towards pro-social behaviours, including ideas as prosaic as painting a fly onto urinals to help men take better aim! (Persuasive technology and captology cover similar themes.)

...if we so chose, however random and seemingly highly improbable events around us may seem, especially as it is almost never too late to embrace change in our lives.

..could schools in 2050 be like this?

...as argued for by Jeremy Rifkin, which claims that we we need to adjust our minds to the demands of our time.

Tracing our history from familial, tribal to religious to national communities, Rifkin proposes that we now come full-circle, rediscover the human ties and feelings of compassion soft-wired into our system and extend them on a global level.

By the beginning of the new decade, in early 2010, it became clear that more and more people were becoming anxious about joining the ranks of the homeless, whose plight was exacerbated by extreme winter weather throughout the northern hemisphere.

...there appear to be nine common diet and lifestyle habits among centenarians.

...in many parts of the world, while we sit here blogging, tweetng, facebooking and passing the days in other, ever-novel forms of self-indulgence.

For example, in Ghana, children burn electrical components to melt off the plastic and reclaim the copper wiring - releasing toxic chemicals into the environment in the process while, in Brazil, man-made fires clear land for cattle or crops. (Thanks to Greenpeace for this salutary reminder.)

There are many stages of human development: from archaic to magic to mythic to rational to pluralistic to integral and higher.

Or, according to Spiral Dynamics: from beige to purple, to red, to blue, to orange, to green, to yellow, to turquoise.

Where are we collectively now?

...when singing of one's self.

A new scientific report claims that every two weeks, the sun pours more energy onto the surface of Earth than we use from all sources in an entire year. It is an inexhaustible powerhouse that has remained largely untapped for human energy needs: but that may soon change in a big way.

Preliminary designs in a German report show electricity reaching Europe via 20 high-voltage direct-current power lines. Trans-Mediterranean links will cross from Morocco to Spain, from Algeria to France, from Tunisia to Italy; from Libya to Greece; and from Egypt to Turkey via Cyprus.

A noted futurist imagines a century during which Japan and Turkey might form an alliance to attack the US, Poland would become America

The passing of Harry Patch truly marks the end of an era. Harry, on behalf of so many millions of others who paid the ultimate sacrifice between 1914-18 (and during all conflicts since) urged us to prefer peace to war.

Harry, be at peace evermore. We will remember you. And perhaps an end to war is possible, after all.

The inevitability of ecological transparency sometime soon will lead, one hopes, to a far greater understanding of the impact of all that we do and buy.

10 years ago, at the birth of the e-business revolution, there was much talk of a "new economy", or a "knowledge economy" (the European Union made a big bet on this one at its 2000 Lisbon summit - it's all gone rather quiet recently), or even an "attention economy" (Accenture, were there many takers?)

Given the grim realities of the noughties, from 911, through climate change, to the credit crunch, to talk of a global depression, such utopian ideals may ring hollow, but now - lo and behold - another version of the new economy is being heralded, built supposedly on a recognition that the only thing too big to fail is the Earth itself.