There are decades where nothing happens’, said Vladimir Illyich Lenin, ’and there are weeks where decades happen’.
Clearly, we’re in one of those moments where a lot happens quickly, where old systems are breaking down, empires are tottering, and new ways are emerging bawling from the womb.
This decade will be the most disruptive of any in human history, according to a book I read this week called Rethinking Humanity, from the think-tank RethinkX.
Read MoreEarlier this month, we explored Nazi spirituality and the contemporary spread of far-right conspiracies in New Age and wellness networks. But the overlap goes deeper than that.
The fact there is such a thing as ‘right-wing spirituality’, or the ‘Cosmic Right’ as some call it, comes as a shock to some New Age seekers, who may have thought spirituality is essentially liberal and progressive, as opposed to traditional religions.
Read MoreLast week’s rallies in London, Berlin, and Los Angeles against lockdown measures attracted both New Agers and far-right groups. We’ve seen before this overlap between the spiritual movement and the fast-spreading conspiracy theory, QAnon, which insists that an evil cabal of Hollywood celebs and liberal politicians (led by Tom Hanks and Hillary Clinton) are child-eating Satanists who control the world.
Read MoreThe first part of this essay looked at the first and second wave of Malthusian thinking, in the 19th and early 20th centuries respectively. This second part will look at the third and fourth wave.
Read MoreTwo visions of the future were unfurled this month. The first was a study from the University of Washington, which showed population was in rapid decline in many countries of the world. The authors suggested world population would peak at around 9 billion, sooner than the UN had predicted. The decline in national populations could, the authors suggested, even lead to nations competing for immigrants from Sub-Saharan Africa to supply the work-force for their countries. It follows comments by Elon Musk last year that the biggest global issue in 20 years will be ‘population collapse’.
Read MoreI’ve always been fascinated by the story of Biosphere 2. In the late 1980s, an avant-garde group of actors and scientists erected a gigantic geodesic dome in the Arizona desert, to see if humans could live in ‘space colonies’ that generate their own food, water and oxygen.
I knew that the experiment had gone wrong, but that was all. I was surprised no one had made a film or book about such an evocative subject. Well, now they have. Matt Wolf’s new documentary Spaceship Earth landed last month and can be viewed online.
Read MoreIn 1992 - almost 30 years ago - James Hillman laid down a stinging critique of therapy culture, arguing it was turning us inwards while the ecology was falling apart. He called for a more revolutionary psychology that challenges our model of the self and re-connects us to the soul of things.
Read MoreOne of the figures in the controversial Tube protest by Extinction Rebellion is a Buddhist teacher who has embraced a new form of revolutionary Buddhism put forward by Rob Burbea. The blowback from the protest show the limits of this philosophy in practical terms.
Read MoreIf you’re in one of those moments where it feels like gravity has increased and the universe is taking a dump on you, here are my three best techniques for getting yourself through difficult times.
Read MoreDo we have the right to bring children into what could be a pretty unpleasant historical situation?
Read MoreThe finale of Game of Thones has been attacked by a flock of angry nerds, while the Avengers climax left them in a warm post-coital glow. But here’s why the GOT finale is actually a lot more interesting for our times.
Read MoreRowan Williams on the role that mysticism and spirituality can play in helping us confront the systematic unreality of our economic and cultural system.
Read MoreYou could accuse XR of being a form of therapy for the middle-classes. Like a cancer support group in the middle of Oxford Circus. But the cancer is not terminal yet. This is an alarm bell, a scream.
Read MoreI met a futurist the other day. A traveller from a future land. We both gave keynotes at a conference on education. I sat next to him at dinner afterwards and asked him a bit about the futurism business, including what he charged for talks (I’m shameless). He shrugged. ’10, maybe 15’. ‘Pounds?’ ‘No…thousands’.
Read MoreThe closest I’ve come to enlightenment was the two minutes when I was lying in a bloody heap on Valsfjell Mountain in Norway. This was back in February 2001. While skiing down a steep slope, I crashed through a fence, flew off a cliff, and landed with a thump, breaking my leg and several vertebrae.
Read MoreThis is about quite a dark subject: the Soviet gulags. I don't recommend reading this essay if you suffer from clinical depression. If you're just somewhat got down by global politics, I do recommend you read this, to realize that things can be a lot worse, and to appreciate what we have going for us.
Read MoreWe’re so used to stories of snowflake students having meltdowns over Halloween costumes that it’s refreshing to remind ourselves they really can change the world for the better.
Read MoreI was walking to the Extinction Rebellion protest last weekend, and I suddenly started crying.
Read MoreI wasn’t a big reader as a youth. I was more of a jock and a class clown. It was only around the age of 17 that I suddenly became a moody adolescent book-worm – it was both a quickening and a sickening. In one term, I read Hamlet, King Lear, Heart of Darkness and Freud’s Five Cases of Hysteria, and also watched Blue Velvet.
Read MoreApologies for the delay in writing. I’ve been in California for the last three weeks, immersed in preparing for Burning Man, then going to Burning Man, then recovering from Burning Man.
Read MoreThis is the best time ever to be alive and human. Global life expectancy has doubled in the last century, from 31 to 71. A century ago, 20% of babies died in childbirth, now it's less than 7%. You're far, far less likely to die violently than in the Middle Ages, the 19th century, or even in the 1960s.
Read MoreWith his unerring knack for the offensive, President Trump responded to last week's Nazi rally in Charlottesville, in which a young woman was murdered, with a condemnation of the 'violence on many sides'.
Read MoreAfter the bombing in Manchester, prime minister Theresa May said, on the steps of Downing Street: 'We struggle to comprehend the warped and twisted mind that sees a room packed with young children not as a scene to cherish but as an opportunity for carnage.'
Read More‘War’, wrote the French knight Jean de Bueil in 1465, ‘is a joyous thing’. War - and violence in general - is 'one of humankind’s great natural highs’, in the words of sociologist Barbara Ehrenreich. War absorbs our consciousness, heightens our senses, distorts times, bonds us to our fellow fighters, and can give us a sense of transcendent meaning and sacred value.
Read MoreWe all know the story. Europe in the 17th century was torn apart by the Wars of Religion. Then, after several decades of extreme violence, people decided to put religious differences to one side, and to come together in the rational, secular, liberal, tolerant state.
Read MoreAs the great general and military strategist Carl von Clausewitz noted in his 1832 book On War, war ‘necessarily involves the feelings’. War is waged as much in our emotions as it is on the battlefield. Each side tries to maintain their own emotional resolve and self-command, while at the same time using violence, shock, and unremitting pressure to ‘wear down’ the enemy’s emotional resources until their will is broken and they submit.
Read MoreI went to the book-launch of a new book on well-being policy yesterday, which brought together some leading figures in this nascent movement - including David Halpern of the government’s ‘nudge unit’, Canadian economist John Helliwell, psychologist Maurren O'Hara, and Juliet Michaelson of the new economics foundation.
Read MoreWell, that was a weird year. 2013 was the year I became a Christian, or rather 'committed my life to Christ' as Christians put it. What does that mean? How did I get here? Am I really a Christian or am I kidding myself? Let's re-wind and play the tape again.
Read MoreSteven Pinker, the Harvard cognitive linguist, would not make a very good ambassador. In his latest diatribe, he attempts to reassure humanities scholars that science is not their enemy. Science is good, and humanities scholars should stop complaining about 'Scientism'. Unfortunately, he says this in such a tactless and, er, Scientistic way that it’s guaranteed to annoy not just humanities scholars, but no doubt many scientists too.
Read MoreThis is a weird time to be alive. To live now is to have the occasional consciousness that our planet is heading for a monumental shift in climate, which is likely to make existence much harder for billions of people in the future.
Read MoreWe’re coming to the end of Stoic Week. People all over the world have been practicing Stoic exercises and reflecting on Stoic ideas this week, thanks to this wonderful initiative, launched by a young post-grad at Exeter University called Patrick Ussher. Some of Patrick’s students have been sharing their thoughts on the exercises via YouTube.
Read MoreThere's a cognitive bias which supposedly causes emotional disorders, whereby you minimize your own achievements while maximizing those of other people. I feel the authors of Britannia Unchained, a new book about how to save the UK from national decline, suffer from this bias.
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