Mindset – The Great Re-Think

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Mindset

Session 4 – The Great Re-Think

with Colin Tudge and special guest Ruby Reed

Saturday April 24
3:00pm BST  |  4:00pm CEST

All sessions are live, recordings will be available for any sessions you can not attend.

‘Mindset’ is the sum of all the ideas, preconceptions, prejudices, predilections and aversions in ‘the basement of our minds’ that we take for granted and rarely pull out for inspection—but inspection is at least salutary and indeed is necessary. The Great Re-Think discusses mindset under four headings: science, morality, metaphysics, and the arts. Very briefly:

Science is wonderful and necessary (of the right kind) but it can only ever be ‘the art of the soluble,’ as Peter Medawar put the matter. Emphatically, it is not the royal road to truth, or the only game in town. Without dumbing down science should be seen and taught primarily as an aesthetic and spiritual pursuit—not as the means to control or indeed to ‘conquer’ nature but as an exercize in appreciation. Its role as a provider of high tech—some of which can help to achieve the goals of conviviality, fulfilment, and care of the Earth—is a definite bonus but not the raison d’etre.

Morality should be an exercise not in utilitarian thinking as now, but in virtue ethics, as embraced by all the great religions. The bedrock principles are those of compassion, humility, and reverence for nature (underpinned by the concept of oneness and a sense of the sacred).

Metaphysics asks what many have called ‘the ultimate questions’ which here are taken to be: What is the universe really like (is it just ‘stuf,’ as materialist-atheists maintain, or what)? What is the basis of goodness? How do we know what’s true? And, How come? Science and standard western philosophy provide partial answers but metaphysics offers further insights—including the vital notion of transcendence and the sense of the sacred. Metaphysics is the core of all bona fide religions—and is very similar in all of them.

The Arts are the jokers in the pack. Follow the imagination and see where it leads.

In all this there are enough points for discussion to last a great many lifetimes—including ‘What, in practice, can we do?’  Colin has ideas on this—but what does everyone else think?

Ruby Reed co-founded transformative education initiative Advaya in 2015, bringing people together to explore links between ecology, society and wellbeing. In 2019 she co-founded educational platform EcoResolution, linking social movements with new audiences, and in 2021 co-founded ecosystem restoration charity Initiative Earth. Ruby is a Trustee of Resurgence Trust, Talks Curator for Medicine Festival, and excited to be part of BeTheEarth Foundation’s flow-funding network. In 2018-2019 she supported Extinction Rebellion, curating programmes at London protests and Rebel Retreats across the UK. Ruby previously worked with art collectors and has a MA in the Renaissance Body from Edinburgh and a MA in Countercultural Art in Latin America from the Courtauld. She is a Freediver and Yoga Therapist with eight years training in yoga, pranayama & Ayurveda.