Yesterday, I whined about feeling powerless at sight of the world’s tragedies, but there may be hope.
Courtesy of the RSA and Cognitive Media, Matthew Taylor talks about hopes for a 21st Century Enlightenment.
Hope is buried in this talk. Modern life is one of rapidly rapidly diminishing person versus person violence. And now that we have tools for seeing, they can evolve into tools for acting. It may be that we’re building a stock of empathy but it’s hard to appreciate.
What if we’re lodged inside a broad, multi-generational transition stage of human reorientation?
Further Reflection
All imagery by Cognitive Media
Since this blog is something like a study-notebook crossed with a diary, here are bullet-points I found interesting.
- Drawing from the lessons of the past enlightenment (which was its itself a conglomerate of disparate ideas), how do contemporary ideas shape our society?
- Our maturing sciences have provided lots of data that gives us greater understanding of ourselves. However, much of this understanding is itself unsettling and defies our sense of control.
- We aren’t always in the driver’s seat; humans respond automatically to events and knowledge. Conscious thought is only part of our behavior.
- We are connected, not separate. We have a relationship with ourselves and our environment.
- We aren’t very good at seeing into the long-term. We’re also bad at knowing just what makes us happy (or even what has made us previously happy).
- We have simplistic notions of freedom, justice, and progress that are due for some re-thinking.
So yes, there are floods, hurricanes, environmental disasters – all that crap. But humans are clever; sometimes we even do the right things. In the short now this is overwhelming, but stretch out the time frame and there may be reason for hope.
As always, Cognitive Media’s animation superbly mirrors the talk. The visual data cements the auditory data into my mind just a bit more. It rewards repeated viewings, too. My only complaint would be that I can’t actually purchase a posterized version of the talk.
That would be wicked cool.
