...a respected academic blog is already imagining such a service, allowing potential supporters to access clear, objective, compelling, multimedia content about any cause or charity that interests them, free from marketing hype, but backed by solid data about the charity's results and impact.
...by not looking for happiness for our own sakes, but instead through helping others.
(Source: Richard Layard - On Happiness from The School of Life on Vimeo.)
(picture source: thinkso.com)
Are too many bloggers the opposite of past generations of activists? Are they, despite claims to the contrary, generally sedentary rather than active, individualised rather than collective, and intellectually disparate rather than united?
We need to get people motivated to cross the street, to care about making a measurable dent into life's most pressing issues within their own lifetimes.
...to total strangers without expecting any payment in return. The BBC has interviewed a man who's done just this after his wife committed suicide 12 years ago.
She had been suffering from progressive multiple sclerosis, and when the pain and suffering became too much for her to bear, she took her own life, leading him to a suspended prison sentence - for failing to stop her - and ultimately to the decision to help others to live by doing as much as he possibly could - by giving away one of his kidneys and part of his liver, and now waiting to become a bone marrow donor...
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.
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.
"How big is that surplus? If you take Wikipedia...the whole project -- every page, every edit, every line of code, in every language Wikipedia exists in -- that represents something like the cumulation of 98 million hours of human thought...And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television."
Prima facie, this is chastening and if it makes us think harder about when/when not to veg out in front of the box, that can only be good. However, on another level, Shirky's argument seems much less convincing, as it fails to take into account how people really "feel" day-to-day. Often, when we slump down in front of the TV with a glass of wine (or other anaesthetic), we do so as a deliberate choice, as a response to tiredness and/or stress: switching off our brains for a while can feel like a well-earned gift to ourselves. Also, of course, so many of us now spend so much of our working days in front of computer screens that passive consumption can often feel like a better bet than conscious creation when our eyes are already glazed over.
More fundamentally still, where is the evidence that all this online creation is really adding value in the offline world? Yes, there are many inspirational examples of social entrepreneurship out there and Halcyon will unashamedly adopt and adapt the best available but, increasingly, so many blog entries and links and twitters and feeds betray little imagination, social or otherwise, and just feel like - to put it politely - narcissistic noise pollution.
...by stopping trying to effect large scale change and trying instead to rediscover and relearn a simpler and easier way to live - i.e. making a living, one that is small-scale, community-based, egalitarian, resilient and principled.
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.
Halcyon has, until now in a very small way, helped homeless people in the cold winter railway stations of Brussels, the busy streets of London and the dusty suburbs of Cairo, and we intend to try and offer more hands-on help in the future. We can also all lend more support via websites such as Change.org and to leading activists such as the Big Issue in their mission to help the homeless to help themselves.
...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.)
Startling as these anecdotes are, other sources such as Worldmapper can show us the bigger picture about the world we live in, by mapping the state of the world's most pressing issues, while other maps show e.g. the geographical prevalence of different diseases around the world.
...self-interest and caring for others." If true, then:
(1) What is the approximate balance between the two today - in individuals, organisations and societies? How much time do we really spend thinking about and then acting on other people's needs?
(2) How can we start an open and ongoing debate about what the balance should be - next year, in 2015, in 2030 etc? I f we don't do this, then how can individuals really know how to lead a "good" life, can organisations know what their wider responsibilities really are and can societies really know how to develop fair policies for all?
(3) How can we then best collaborate with one other, sharing our good practices and our ideas and reaching out for a consensus on the most effective actions, projects and policies to get us ever closer to that optimum balance between self-interest and active compassion?
What will be the best fora and media for involving as many people as possible in both the debate and the sharing?
Halcyon intends to play a key role in starting to answer such questions.
