Events

Though the world is now in a dreadful state and popes and scientists warn of impending collapse, humanity and our fellow creatures could still be looking forward to a long and glorious future: at least a million years of peace and personal fulfilment with abundant and diverse wildlife. But to achieve this we need to re-think everything we do and take for granted from first principles—those of morality and ecology, both rooted in the all-but forgotten discipline of metaphysics which embraces both science and religion. The re-think and re-structuring amount to nothing less than a Renaissance—more far-reaching than the Renaissance that ended the European Middle Ages.

Enlightened agriculture (with corresponding cuisine)—and the grand cause of conviviality, personal fulfilment, and a flourishing biosphere—cannot come about without an appropriate, supportive infrastructure—compounded of the government, the economy, and the law. The economy is ‘the matrix of our lives.’ It is in practice the medium through which we translate our aspirations into material reality. So it is vital to have the right aspirations—and to devise an economy that really does help us to meet our needs and fulfil our dreams (insofar as our dreams are compatible with the bedrock principles of morality and ecological reality).

‘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: