Civilisation: the oldest confidence trick in history?

Researchers at universities in Portugal and Belgium discovered earlier in the year that the way to less selfish societies is to give individuals the freedom to behave as they wish. Their research gives scientific weight to the idea that, left to their own devices, people tend naturally to cooperation.

Though perhaps not a huge surprise to most of us, it offers another important challenge to the traditional line that our default priority behaviour is to compete – a line that has determined the rules of our economic and social systems for centuries.

Civilisation hasn’t stopped trampling on tribes….

If you’re of the mind that our civilisation is more civilised than past civilisations, you’re probably right — especially if you consider the full definition of civilised (which includes the tendency to exterminate, exploit, oppress, imprison or immiserate everything that isn’t) proposed in the post after this. Not convinced?

By The Skin Of Our Teeth

Pretty soon now, we’ll be holding on by the skin of our teeth,

like Miss Lala at the Cirque Fernando: suspended above

a terrifying drop, as we reach for the impossible

(which has to be possible) under the warm sunset ceiling

of our current predicament. We could always shimmy down

that inviting lifeline to where we started from, but what good

would that do us? And it’s too late anyhow.

Thoughts from the heartlands (on wealth)

A young Weyeba boy on the island of Sumba in Indonesia watches the loggers cutting down the giant trees near his village and asks his grandfather: why are they destroying what is valuable?

“Because to them, the trees are worth more dead than alive. You may ask: how can this be? The answer is that they do not understand the true meaning of wealth.

News from the frontier (3)

“Business as usual must end, because business as usual is killing us,” the indigenous peoples of the world have stated, in a powerful and eloquent summing up of the five-day Indigenous Peoples’ Global Summit on Climate Change, held in Anchorage, Alaska at the end of April.

Climate change brings into sharp relief the confrontation between industrial civilisation and indigenous peoples. Caused by the actions of the rich, polluting nations its effects are felt most keenly by those who live closest to nature and whose livelihoods most directly depend on their immediate environment. (Just 500 miles from the summit, in the village of Newtok, intensifying river flow and melting permafrost have forced 320 residents to relocate to higher ground; meanwhile stories like “Water people of the Amazon face extinction” are increasingly and depressingly familiar.)

Telling it like it is: news from the dead centre (3)

The IPCE (Institute of Public Confusion Enhancement) is delighted to see its policies and recommendations feeding into the activities of research and funding agencies in the UK.

Now that growing numbers of people appear to be spotting that a finite planet cannot support ever-growing consumer demands, Government needs mechanisms to show that it is addressing this inconvenience while at the same time not challenging any of the growth assumptions crucial to the ongoing support of its financiers.

Catching up, switching on

Evo Morales has been at it again, saying bold and beautiful things that other world leaders will likely dismiss as radical or simply ignore, instead of recognising his brave attempts to get us to value Earth’s life support systems before it’s too late. On Earth Day, April 22nd, Morales addressed the United Nations calling for the countries of the world to accept a set of principles that would protect the planet’s resources and ‘right to life’.

Lifting depression – a natural response to an unnatural world

In a recent newspaper article, Martin Amis wrote of the recently departed J G Ballard: ‘He kept asking: what effect does the modern setting have on our psyches – the modern sculpture of the highways, the airport architecture, the culture of the shopping mall, pornography and technology? The answer to that question is a perversity that takes various mental forms, all of them extreme.’

Science: shining beacon or siren on the rocks?

It’s that time again: time for governments to pump up science as panacea to world ills, for ministers to commission national surveys to discover why young people won’t study it (and most people still don’t get excited about it) and for public-engagement experts to work out new strategies for getting us to see the light.

You have permission to be healthy

Take a meander through recent media coverage of health and medicine news; you’ll discover that hospital drug reactions are ‘common,’ with one in seven hospital patients in the UK experiencing adverse reactions (half of which are completely avoidable); that the drug methylphenidate, commonly known as Ritalin and prescribed for hundreds of thousands of children each year who are labelled with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), may physically change the brain in the same way that cocaine does; and that ‘addictions to over-the-counter and prescription drugs are a “significant” problem and require “urgent” attention’.