Halcyon Imagines

Imagining how to tackle even the world's "too difficult" issues...

 

 
On 10 January 2011, Start the Week asked what has gone wrong in the West.

• Economist Dambisa Moyo charted 50 years of economic folly and argued that only radical changes in policy will stem permanent decline.
• Lord Lawson, the former UK Chancellor, exposed what he called "myths" surrounding economic thinking.
• Journalist Stephen Kinzer called on the US and UK to ditch its present allies in the Middle East - Saudi Arabia and Israel - and look to Turkey and even Iran for support.
• Labour's former Home Secretary, Charles Clarke, further explored those seemingly intractable problems, with a series of debates drawn from the "too difficult" box.

Listen to their debate here.

Imagining we could reach a state of "xenophilia"...

...overcoming our "homophily", i.e. the love of that which is like us, and reaching the love of that which is different? 

Indeed, if we're ever going to care enough about conflict, genocide, poverty, hunger etc. enough to act on them properly, then we need to try much harder to avoid conflict with people we might not yet fully understand.

Imagining the next 100 years...really?

A noted futurist imagines a century during which Japan and Turkey might form an alliance to attack the US, Poland would become America’s closest ally. Mexico would make a bid for global supremacy, and a third world war would take place in space!

Are such forecasts meaningful, however?  A dimly-remembered book from the late 1980s forecast nuclear war between Brazil and Argentina by 2011; temporally, it could still happen, but realistically, it's - hopefully - rather unlikely...

In any case, experts on complexity point out repeatedly that complex systems do not lend themselves to the mechanistic approaches (such as forecasting, cause-and-effect analysis and systems analysis) that work in merely complicated systems.  Confident "back-casting" from even a year's hence therefore seems a rather risky business, but from 100 years? 

Nevertheless, we still need to plan where we can - e.g. to mitigate against the worst effects of climate change.  So what can we forecast and prepare for with confidence at the societal level and what remains in the realm of fantasy?  This seems to be one of the key questions of the age...

Imagining (yes, yet again, but is it wrong to keep trying?) an end to war

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.