I was listening to Professor Lord Anthony Giddens talk about his new book The Politics Of Climate Change today and one thing in particular struck a cord. Giddens pooh-poohed Fukuyama’s concepts of The End of History pointing out that if anything, climate change and the new politics it requires of the mankind-project calls for an urgent and radical continued evolution of history and society.
We urgently need new futures and for history and culture to move ahead to more fertile philosophies and values. Only through such a radical updating of our currently badly failing operating systems can we hope to halt or slow the onset of unstoppable runaway climate change. Only through transitioning out of boom-bust, autistic, growth-obsessed economics, out of left-right swinging sclerotic politics and out of the myths of CSR and our valueless hyper-consumer affluenza can we hope to survive, let alone flourish.
So it’s more like The end of the End of History. Time to stand up and be counted. And who will lead the way into this new history-in-the-making? Politics seems all but dead and valueless. Business often-times looks like a rabbit in the headlights, asked now not only to make short-term shareholder returns but also make the world a better place, but finding it hard to do either. Our best hope lies in ourselves the citizens.
The poet and novelist Ben Okri summed it up so very well recently, when he said that ‘The meltdown in the economy is a harsh metaphor of the meltdown of some of our value systems. Individualism has been raised almost to a religion, appearance made more important than substance. The only hope lies in a fundamental re-examination of the values that we have lived by in the past 30 years’.
And how might we do that? Personally, I’m with Vaclav Havel who believes ‘that the only option is a change in the sphere of the spirit, in the sphere of human conscience. It’s not enough to invent new machines, new regulations, new institutions. We must develop a new understanding of the true purpose of our existence on this Earth. Only by making such a fundamental shift will we be able to create new models of behaviour and a new set of values for the planet.’
Exciting times we live in. We are history in the making…
