Scilla Elworthy on Humanity (RSA)

Old value: Survival of the fittest.
New value: Cooperation is more efficient.

Old value: Might makes right.
New value: Common security is safer and cheaper than one based on weapons and superior power.

Old value: Humans have right to do as we like with the earth.
New value: Humans are responsible stewards of the earth.

Old value: Science and the rational mind are what matter most.
New value: The human body mind, feelings, and spirit are acting together constantly and the whole package is consciousness.

Old value: Continuing economic growth is essential.
New value: Growth in consciousness is now more important.

Old value: Good fences make good neighbors.
New value: Building trust is the most effective form of security.

Old value: Short-term-ism is fine.
New value: Our decisions now must take account what the oldest indigenous traditions have told us for centuries - to think in terms of seven generations.

Old value: The technical fix will always be invented in time to resolve serious problems.
New value: There is a greater intelligence available and its infinitely more powerful than anything in the mind.

Old value: Women are too emotional to deal with the real issues in business and world affairs.
New value: The capacities of the deep feminine and deep masculine in both men and women are now seen as essential for human survival on the planet.

Old value: Consuming is our right.
New value: What we really desire is to satisfy human longing for meaning and beauty.

I am seeing more of these too and it is a sign that not all hope is lost. Much of this is quite encourageable so long as it is through positive, constructive means as opposed to the counter-productive negative, persecuting ones.

I'm sure, considering how often the current 'state of the world' is bemoaned nowadays, the suggestions she makes here would be refuted by many...

But I think we see the truth of much of what she says pervading all aspects of society (certainly here in the UK) - the attitudes of younger generations are changing so very quickly. The current generation of teenagers are infinitely more accepting, more compassionate, than even my generation (current mid-twenties) were - teenagers now can't even seem to comprehend why there is any issue over the rights of women, LGBT, refugees, immigrants, etc etc. And one gets the sense that their bewilderment is not borne out of some superficial teenage rebellion, but actual, genuine, deeply-rooted compassion...

These generational disconnects - the generational evolution from the inward looking to the outward looking - was nowhere clearer to see in the UK than in the case of Brexit, in which the chasm was demonstrated to be even wider than I think anyone had really realised or was perhaps even ready to discover... :dry:

I think that what Dr Elworthy proposes in this lecture is why we are all here. We may or may not be aware of it.

It seems that it takes a certain sensitivity and understanding of political theory to understand much of anything of what Dr. Elworthy is saying here... Because I have no such expertise, I am struggling to do just that. Since however Dr. Elworthy is not here to explain it to myself and users like me and is unlikely to register just for that purpose, Alex, would you kindly present what you had in mind for discussion in her stead?

It isn't really too hard, Anton ... She's talking about how values are shifting from the "common sense" of the last couple centuries that are at root-one with all our social and environmental problems. Essentially, those two considerations by which she began (1. The richest 300 people in the world have more combined wealth than the poorest three thousand million, and 2. public pessimism about the future is pretty generalised) are the grounds for many people wanting to do something to help others to find avenues to do.

These changes in the governing values, leading us away from being a "me-centred" consumer society towards being a global civilisation grounded in empathy, listening to one another and long-term solutions to problems (beyond merely short-term profit) are not what we need to convince politicians and legislatures to take up as part of a platform, they are bottom-up changes that we can all work on.

There is nothing of the soppy "we are all One" pseudo-spiritual horse-poo going on here ; there are certainly diverse groups of people with divergent interests over a wide spectrum of group and individual identities ... but the unitive value of giving expression (and paying attention to that expression) to those who have erstwhile had no voice. The global community has already happened -- it was brought about by the technologies and the market systems that have doubled the human life-span and quadrupled the population of the planet, but in so doing has brought on disastrous impact on the environment and plunged a significant portion of the quadrupled planetary population into poverty. The old model, with the old values (no matter how recent they actually are) will not work any more : the general public pessimism shows that this is not only a new "common sense," but an evident truth.

The beauty of it is, we don't have to go all gooky "we are One" to participate in bringing about these changes for our civilisation. As Ros pointed out, we are one of the cells that is doing some of the things she is talking about. Those 10 transformations of values that she talks about goes pretty well with the ideals we say we hold. We're not the only ones.

... and that is a good thing, to my mind.

Alexandre Orion wrote: The global community has already happened -- it was brought about by the technologies and the market systems that have... ...plunged a significant portion of the quadrupled planetary population into poverty.

The opposite is true.

I've seen that too, M. Yet, I would not say that the opposite is "true." It seems as though what we call poverty ought to be re-examined ; even if things are better on a global scale, with extreme poverty in steep decline, it would be an error to assume that we are doing everything right now and just keep going as we have done waiting for the problems to go away. There is yet quite a bit of refining left to do concerning distributive justice. And that doesn't take into consideration all the other ways we make judgements about others...

Thus, I don't feel as though it is the opposite that is true, but that the changing values are showing us other opposites.

The thing is though that great differences in wealth and power have been prevalent pretty much since the dawn of civilization. In some places it was worse than in others, as it is at some times compared to others, but the mighty kings and the voiceles slaves is something we haven't had a recorded day without yet. And public pessimism about the future is likewise something everpresent. So if indeed there is a change in attitude or approach or values (and I'm not at all convinced that there is), it stands to reason that these wouldn't be the sole or most important catalysts of these changes. On top of that, some of the values she calls new have been platitudes for millennia and remain little more than that to this day, whereas some of the values she calls old are rather recent and remain quite prevalent in many a case or were hardly representative caricatures of the more cynical opinions in the first place. I for one find it rather simplistic to point to two values and say that one is just plain better than the other, especially when the two aren't even in conflict, and merely asserting that there is a shift also leaves me for one waiting for the point, the argument, the invitation, or the challenge...
That's why I said I didn't understand what Dr. Elworthy was talking about. To me it felt like somewhat of a mess; I don't know either where she was coming from nor where she was going with it. And with her not being here to talk back, I felt like instead talking to someone who is and would.

We aren't going to make an appeal to authority error here, yet I would guess that she has probably considered these things from a critical/analytical standpoint as well and would invite everyone else to do the same.

It really doesn't matter too much what all we've left in history ; as I was just commenting in response to M : our "progress" ought not be construed as "look how far we've come" as much as indicate to us how much we have left to do.

Concerning wealth inequalities, the third and fourth parts of Piketty's "Le Capital au XXIème siècle" also points to redistribution of wealth owing to - as you so rightly evoke there - it always tends to shift itself towards the top (demonstrated in the first and second parts of the book via a great lot of soporific historical data).

You're also right about these ideas not being particularly new. But, does that really matter if they are good ideas ?