Description
Compelling reading, this book both reinforces and elevates the role of art in the exploration and analysis of the concepts of democracy, globalization and capitalism. In the book, the author describes a post-human world, a state we have already entered. But how should we think about it, given we have already been co-opted? Can we articulate the future outside the false discipline that the market often dictates, beyond the clutches of a few social media companies, and maintain our rich diversities while holding on to those things that make life possible and worthwhile: love, hope and art?
Running throughout the book is the central theme of uncertainty and divergence. It is uncompromising in asking the question about the need for a new global creation story, which has at its core not the certainties of one defined creation myth but the need to feel comfortable with the uncertainty principle both in physics and the political economy. It is up to artists, scientists and philosophers to articulate this wonder and to help us write a new global creation story based on art (the arts), uncertainty, diversity, risk and wonder – and of course knowledge. This book has the capacity to both clarify and re-shape your thinking.
Table of Contents
Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction: The Reflective Observer
1. This Century’s New Creation Myth
1.1 Time, Nothing and God
1.2 Relativity, Faure and Human Fallibility
1.3 Trees
1.4 Tolerance and Utopia
2. Good Capitalism: Love, Hope, Art and Social Progress
2.1 The Fertile Twentieth Century
2.2 Different Political Economies
2.3 The Good Societies
2.4. Sewage and Social Progress
2.5 Brief Encounter
2.6 Europe Dreaming
2.7 Red Geraniums and Poppies
2.8 The Greek Legacy
2.9 Flatpack Sweden
2.10 A United Kingdom?
2.11 The Ja panese Conundrum
2.12 India
2.13 The Chinese Ascendency
2.14 The Rise and Fall of the American Century
3. Health and Wealth
3.1 Lessons for Longevity
3.2 The Somme, Beveridge and Public Health Care
3.3 Near Death
3.4 Mindlessness
4. The Good Society and the Post Human Future
4.1 Bombs, Climate Change and Men
4.2 The Good Society: Theory and Practise
4.3 What Is Needed Now: Public Reasoning and the Public Intellectual
Appendix: How to Live Healthily
