Halcyon Imagines

Imagining bringing together many of the world's best brains...

 

 

...with the shared purpose of improving the world.  The growing stable of TED and TEDx events around the world is quickly gaining traction; the next challenge will be to further democratise and create shared value from more of the bright ideas that these processes generate.

Imagining how mapping humans' intricate social networks...

 

...could better our lives, by e.g. detecting epidemics earlier than ever, from the spread of innovative ideas, to risky behaviours, to viruses.

Imagining ideas having sex...

At TEDGlobal 2010, author Matt Ridley shows how, throughout history, the engine of human progress has been the meeting and mating of ideas to make new ideas.

This closely reflects Theodore Zeldin's desire to introduce ideas that have never met.

Imagining understanding our deepest human impulses...

 

...unlikely, perhaps, as even the world's top psychologists struggle with this still.

Imagining being able to see the world as a whole

Or in a grain of sand.

Reading Stanley Fish in the New York Times stirred memories of having read Robert Pirsig’s "Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values" (1974).  The narrative follows a long motorcycle journey the author takes with his son and two friends. Another main character (present only in thought and imagination) is named Phaedrus.  He is at once Pirsig’s alter-ego, a questing philosopher of daunting and destabilising intellect, and the foil of Socrates in the Platonic dialogue that bears his name. 

Fish argues too that the philosophy Pirsig and Phaedrus wrestles with is a variant of the holism of those philosophers who share a conviction that knowledge of the world cannot be achieved by inventorying its discrete parts.  Rather, they contend, the world must first be conceived or assumed whole and entire and the emergence of its parts and the possibility of describing them then follows.

This lies at the heart of Halcyon's ambition but, paradoxically, in order to describe the world whole and to destroy divisive categorisation, it is tempting to first divide the world back into its component parts - be they issues, or the values, ideas or domains of knowledge that taken together can help us address those issues - and then label them, before starting on the fun and valuable part - i.e. the alchemy of putting together ideas and values that have never met.  ("Take a dash of authenticity, add two parts innovation and a drop of responsibility...")

The danger though, and hinted at by Fish and Pirsig, is that the inventory and the labelling can take a lifetime, and we lose ourselves by spending too much time in taxonomy and too little in alchemy, investing too much in diagnosis and too little in cure.

Our aim? Introducing ideas that have never met...

From today, our Halcyon Days blog will also include posts of some the thousands of comments and quotes by others that have made us feel and have made us think. 

Many of these quotes are already available on the community pages at Halcyon Future, but we will now also start to share these quotes here in order to encourage others to reflect upon and make use of the ideas - and in many cases, the timeless and profound wisdom - contained within them. 

For now, we will deliberately not comment directly on most of the quotes that we post because, although they stir much in us, we would like to leave it you to interact with the quotes in your own way. We will therefore simply tag the quotes under the same categories that we use for all other entries here, and on both Halcyon Future and Halcyon News (where we share exciting responses to the world's problems). 

You can therefore now easily find news, quotes, blog entries for all of Halcyon's communities under common categories, and we will soon add audio, video, conversations and related content from all over the social web. 

However, we also believe that most value will come not from leaving ideas within their categories - on the contrary, we believe that such silo thinking actually compounds many of the world's problems - but rather, like a chemist or perhaps an alchemist, from introducing to one another ideas that have never met. 

For example, how well can acceptance co-exist with activism, complexity with simplicity, or consumption with sustainability?  Only one way to find out: let's get them together and watch the novelty emerge...