How Participatory Arts Ignite Positive Change

 Culture is our necessary and renewable resource, the fourth pillar of sustainable development, though we often overlook it. The obstacle, in part, has been the word itself. Culture means two opposite things. One meaning is a heritage of shared beliefs, practices, and places, something to be protected rather than tampered with. This is the sense used by most decision-makers who are trained in the social sciences which privilege patterns over disruptions. The other sense is dynamic and familiar to artists and humanists who disrupt patterns and generate new relationships. One understanding is fixed, making culture either an obstacle to development or a fringe area for decoration and leisure, vulnerable to budget cuts. The other is edgy, experimental, and jealous of personal freedom. This difference in meaning causes a blind spot for both mayors and creatives who see past one another when collaborations are urgently needed to adjust outdated attitudes and behaviours that currently block development toward the SDGs.

Picture above: Copyright: Mannheim Public Library, Copyright Yilmaz Holtz Ersahin and Angelika Senft Rubarth

As part of a leader‘s toolbox, participatory arts can play a significant role in addressing the global challenges of SDGs. “Had I understood the power of arts to change behaviour and to drive prosperity, I would have made very different decisions as Minister of Development.” (José Molinas of Paraguay, formerly of The World Bank.) His change of perspective inspires a new “Certificate in Arts and Policy” for city governments in order to engage arts toward achieving a city’s goals, and to articulate particular goals with all the others. Each depends on the articulation: e.g. public health depends on education, transportation, violence prevention, etc. Education depends on public health, transportation, violence prevention, etc. The hybrid virtual and in-person sessions presents existing “Cases for Culture” and then customises co-constructions of new projects for the city’s challenges and resources. The Certificate complements the social science background of most leaders with humanistic thinking that recognises the arts as dynamic vehicles for developing human and social capital. (See https://renaissancenow-cai.org/wp/arts-and-policy/)

A scenario for art in the 21st century

The turn of the 21st century has been marked by a series of crises on a global scale. Through the infosphere, that electromagnetic envelope that surrounds Planet Earth and which we have been using for communication since the mid-19th century through radio technology, from telephones to satellites, a global society emerged in the course of the 20th century. News that used to take months from source to receiver—of earthquakes to stock market fluctuations—is now distributed almost simultaneously across the globe. The mass mobility of people and goods has additionally created a condensed global society. As a result, crises are not limited to local topographies, but spread globally. From the climate crisis to the migration crisis, from the financial crisis to the COVID-19 crisis, we are witnessing ever more profoundly shattering consequences. Principles of our civilisation built on the successes of humanism and the Enlightenment—for example, the universalism of human rights, equality of race, gender and age before the law, autonomy of the individual, freedom of the press and arts, democracy—are increasingly being challenged. Due to the climate crisis, the overall habitability of Planet Earth by humans—and thus humanity’s ability to survive—is being called into doubt. Mass migrations in the coming decades could therefore radically change the face of the Earth and the social systems that have

Picture above: Peter Weibel, Copyright: ZKM | Zentrum für Kunst und Medien Karlsruhe, photo by Christof Hierholzer

But the Italian Renaissance was not the first scientification of art. The Arabic Islamic Renaissance occurred between 800 and 1200. The Banū Mūsā brothers created programmable musical automata around 850. Ibn al-Razzuz Al-Jazari wrote the book Compendium on the Theory and Practice of the Mechanical Arts around 1200. From Baghdad to Andalusia, Arab artists and scholars, such as Ibn Khalaf al-Murādī and Abū Ḥātim al-Muẓaffar al-Isfazārī, rediscovered and advanced Greek and Byzantine traditions. For example, the term algorithm comes from a Latinisation of the name of the Arab scholar Abu Jafar Muhammad ibn Musa al-Chwārizmī. As Hans Belting has documented in Florence and Baghdad, Abū ‚Alī Ibn al-Haiṯam (965-1040, known in the West as Alhazen) wrote Kitāb al-Manāẓir. His work was translated into Latin in the 12th century and contains fundamental studies on the propagation and refraction of light. The reception of Ibn al-Haiṯam’s theory of light and vision triggered one of the most exciting chapters in the history of Western art. Alhazen can be considered the inventor of the camera obscura and the forerunner of the invention of perspective. Perspectiva was the Latin title of his Arabic work on optics which was later replaced by the Greek term Optics and then again by the Latin Opticae Thesaurus (1572).

Spirit, are you there?

Leonardo da Vinci is probably the most acclaimed creative mind of all time and the epitome of the Renaissance man. His knowledge, talents, vision, and imagination spanned several disciplines that sadly now constitute different cultures: Science and Art. We admire Leonardo so much not only for what he did, but also and maybe even more for what he anticipated: in his notebooks, he figured out ideas and possibilities that would only become a reality several centuries later. And yet, if we think of it, most of what we admire Leonardo for did not work. His tank or his submarine, to cite a few famous examples, are brilliant intuitions, but nothing more. Even an artistic masterpiece like The last supper is in critical condition because Leonardo experimented with a new painting technique of his own invention, a tempera grassa, that would fail to stick properly to the humid wall. A detractor of his time would not have been in a difficult position in depicting Leonardo as a fraud by selectively picking a collection of such incidents. But his experimental, risk-taking attitude was a constant feature of his creative method. This raises an interesting question: Do we admire Leonardo because of his mistakes or despite his mistakes?

But is this really the case? It is true that, retrospectively, mistakes can be good and are seen under a different light once one recognises how they prepared the condition for later success. But when mistakes are made, it is much more difficult to take them cheerfully, especially when one is moved by an enthusiasm and sense of possibility that clash with sudden, sometimes brutal denial. Being mistaken may sometimes sound like being treated unfairly in terms of lack of responsiveness to something that deserved more attention and consideration, and it really hurts. What is or is not a mistake does not depend only on objective conditions but may also reflect social circumstances. A good idea can become a mistake when it is proposed ahead of the time and is basically not understood by others—but is it then a fault to see things long before others do, as

In which metaverse do we want to live?

The Metaverse—A ubiquitous, synchronised universe where presence and sense of presence become indistinguishable.

For those of us who were born in the 20th century, the word „metaverse“ came to be associated with science fiction books and films of the 1990s which depict a dystopian future dominated by technology. In most of them, humanity is dominated by mega corporations, totalitarian governments or dehumanised scientists who use simulated worlds and robotic environments to subject people to situations of oppression, domination and injustice.

But for those who grew up with the online world as an integrated space within the physical world, the metaverse is simply a collection of all the virtual universes that coexist in the cloud and are necessarily shared, interactive, immersive and collaborative.

One is inherited from the current model of society, led by closed platforms and Big Tech that are not necessarily the bad boys of so many dystopian novels. But there are indeed few and dominant players of the digital economy of the 21st century. They claim the central role such huge machines should be allowed to have, to make this Metaverse happen in an ordered and controlled way, far from actual wilderness of the internet sphere that includes the worst we can see from ourselves in the deep and dark web.

Another vision, in stark contrast, talks about an Open Metaverse created with open technology and open protocols that allow increasingly decentralised and accessible environments for almost anyone. This is the vision of those creators of—and believers in—Web 3.0, which has been evolving for at least 10 years. They advocate for an Open Metaverse based on principles of digital sovereignty and easy access to data and protocols for people to achieve a new world economic order, an order  perhaps better, perhaps fairer, perhaps more promising for those who now lie at the bottom of the actual world’s economy.

A third vision, probably the most plausible one, is a coexistence of both centralised and decentralised visions, convergent and divergent environments in which any kind of ordering or regulation will be complex but might prove necessary.

multiple identities for each person—physical and digital—and a possible total sovereignty for each opens up an unexplored universe.

The sovereignty of identity in the physical world, in the virtual world and in what emerges from the combination of both universes for future generations may completely change social relations in the decades to come.

Somehow, once again, as in Europe’s First Renaissance, the New Renaissance will be all about the convergence of Culture, Economy and Technology.

Towards digital humanism

The European Renaissance began first in Italy after a period of exhaustion by plagues, misery and wars. In the mid-14th century, the plague had plunged Europe into one of the worst catastrophes of mankind, an incurable disease that brought great pain to those afflicted and usually a quick death. Even before the plague, a long-lasting famine had taken hold, for which climate change in the form of significantly falling temperatures probably played a decisive role. The structures of social order eroded and everyday life became brutalised. The population declined markedly, with the paradoxical effect of a valorisation of human labour and an increase in productivity brought about by new technologies. The European Renaissance was preceded by a creeping decline in the authority of clerical and princely authorities, and was characterised by a return to ancient thought, especially that of the Greek Classical period and the Roman Empire. Aristotle was disposed of—prematurely—because the Thomasian worldview, unlike patristics, was based on his writings and had made them the authoritative source alongside the Holy Scriptures.

The renaissance of digital transformation is based on the empowerment of human authorship, on the development of human creativity, on the targeted, intelligent and measured use of new technologies for human purposes. It aims to humanise the world of work through sustainable production and the establishment of fair practices in the global economy, while the current development path has established monopoly structures in the form of large tech giants, shifted greater parts of economic value creation to platforms and made a successful business model out of the skimming of user data from digital service offerings for marketing purposes. This humanistic form of digital transformation will not be feasible without a state framework in the form of digital infrastructures, without an independent European path of „human centred AI“ and transparent uses while safeguarding informational self-determination rights, without a European legal framework of digital dynamics. But the chances are good that the humanistic form will ultimately prevail over the commercial model of Silicon Valley and the state control model of China and other autocratic and totalitarian states.

Beyond the obvious

In the middle of the 20^th century Europe was ravaged by world war. But it continued to dominate the world. The empires of Britain and France remained vast. Europe accounted for over a fifth of the world’s population and most of its largest economies.By the middle of the 21^st century that will all have changed dramatically. Europe’s share of world population will be closer to a twelfth; its economies will have been overtaken not just by China and India but possibly by others such as Brazil and Nigeria. Its military might will be modest compared to the superpowers.

Moreover, many of the things that might have once seemed uniquely European no longer do. There are many examples of healthy democracies and many examples of the rule of law. Science is more generously funded in countries like South Korea or Israel than most of the EU.

To the extent that people across the world talk about European values, they talk as much about slavery, exploitation and genocide as they do about human rights.

So, any discussion of renaissance has to be tempered by humility. Too much European self-love feels ever less appropriate to the times.

Picture above: Geoff Mulgan, Copyright: NESTA

Climate change is now the most visible big crisis, prompting an extraordinary range of artistic responses. Most try to bear witness to what’s happening. Olafur Eliasson’s blocks of ice melting in city squares vividly make people think about climate change as a reality, not an abstraction. A similar effect is achieved by Andri Snær Magnason’s plaque to commemorate a lost glacier in Iceland or the World Meteorological Organization’s short videos presenting fictional weather reports from different countries in the year 2050: “WMO Weather Reports 2050.”  Others turn the medium into the message, re-using waste materials to signal the emergence of a more circular economy.Literature is also grappling with climate change. What one author called ‘socio-climatic imaginaries’ can be found in novels such as Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife and Kim Stanley Robinson’s Green Earth (both from 2015) which go beyond the eco-apocalypse to examine the multiple interactions between nature and social organisation. Kim Stanley Robinson has spoken of science fiction as “a kind of future-scenarios modelling, in which some course of history is pursued as a thought experiment, starting from now and moving some distance off into the future” and makes a good case that literature is better placed to do this than anything else. As the warning signs of crisis intensify we should expect all the arts to respond in creative ways, both warning and bearing witness but also pointing to how we might collectively solve our shared problems.

In 1951 the German philosopher, Theodor Adorno, published an essay called ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’. One remark in it, often taken out of context, made the essay famous: “After Auschwitz to write a poem is barbaric.” Whatever controversies it provoked, and however much Adorno subsequently changed his thinking about the relation between poetry and society, his comment remains emblematic of an important intuition. Language, and its expressive potentials, are not immune from historical events. Language has a distinctive life and social being, a life which can be enhanced, damaged or, in some of its forms, made obsolete. Violence threatens the life of language as it threatens other forms of life.

It is worth recalling the context that provoked Adorno’s remark. The holocaust remains at its dark centre, but, between 1939 and 1945, 36 million Europeans lost their lives in war related deaths. Many of the dead were civilians. The loss of life amongst Russians was greatest and more people died in eastern than in western Europe. But, however you analyse the numbers, what happened was probably the greatest act of human self-slaughter in history.

For Merleau Ponty le langage parlant is a creative state, but it also affirms and recreates a social bond.  It becomes what he describes as a “gesture of renewal and recovery which unites me with myself and others.” While he finds examples of this kind of language in literature it is by no means confined to a specialised form of creativity. The experience of “renewal and recovery” occurs for the speaker and the listener, for the individual and the collective. To utter le langage parlant is a potential in all of us, but one that circumstance can easily damage or restrict. It also marks the moment when language comes alive.

The first European renaissance marked a great transition in language in its affirmation of the expressive power and the literary dignity of different vernacular languages that were destined for a while to become the different national languages of Europe. The next renaissance will perhaps move in another direction, one that has been described as a colonial phenomenon, creolisation, where different languages and cultures mix and mingle. How we talk to each other and in what language or languages will become of ever greater importance. A ‘poetics for Europe’ will foster the conditions for a langage parlant made out of the interaction between different languages and cultures. One of its hallmarks will be the understanding that in saying something we are always doing something and that one of the things we are doing is recreating or dissolving the conviviality that can connect us one to another.

Shaping the past, changing the future?

Renaissance, Reformation, Enlightenment, Modernity: these terms for epochs of progress and awakening continue to shape the collective identity of Europe and of the Western world to this day. Their achievements are rightly pointed out and their pioneers and representatives remembered.

However, what has increasingly entered public discourse and thus collective consciousness in recent years is a fundamental ambivalence that characterises Europe’s history of progress in the modern era—on the one hand, a claim to values shaped by humanism, and on the other, a lived practice that all too often contradicts the ideals formulated.

This contradictoriness comes to light especially in Europe’s relationship to non-Europe. On the one hand, the great Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant laid the foundation for the modern, enlightened, Western worldview with the Categorical Imperative and his universalist moral and legal philosophy. On the other hand, he countered precisely this worldview with profoundly racist statements on the supposed superiority and inferiority of Europeans and non-Europeans respectively.¹ In 1788, he certified the Native Americans as being „incapable of all culture“ and thus „even lower“ than the inhabitants of Africa. These and other reference points in his work are difficult to reconcile with the idea of universal human dignity postulated by Kant.

Picture above: Ebert_Degenkolb_Videostill from the project Intervention M 21 (www.decolonizem21.info) The (De)Coloni al Glossary, Part 1, Europe – Non-Europe, Copyright: Aliza Yanes & Santiago Calderón

The project “Latitude“ invited a global exchange on colonial power relations from September 2019 to November 2021. In interviews, essays, festivals and numerous other formats, topics such as decolonisation, the preservation of indigenous cultures, the role of museums, restitution and the treatment of cultural heritage are negotiated. Latitude refers to the cartographic concept of a demarcation line in relation to the equator, which goes hand in hand with a distinction between the southern and northern latitudes. Through this separation, the term associatively points to inequality in terms of power relations: the imposition of the systematic power of many countries from the global North over regions from the South. Latitude is a space for respectful exchange—cultural, political, economic and aesthetic.

¹ Kant, AA IX: Logik – Physische Geographie, 1802.

² American Declaration of Independence, July 4th, 1776.

³ Nostalgie – Geschichte, Theorie, Kritik, symposium Nostalgia and Remembrance at the Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History Potsdam, July, 14th, 2021.

Beauty, epiphany, neurons

Six hundred years ago a small group of innovators changed history. They lived in Italy, and the name of their era, the Renaissance, is delightfully compact. It means rebirth, renewal and the emergence of new character. Europe has experienced more than one renaissance, but the Quattrocento occupies a special place in the imagination. The reason is clear. Unlike comparable eras, the Italian Renaissance produced colourful characters who embody wide-ranging achievement: Renaissance people who excelled in the arts, science and engineering. The influence of Filippo Brunelleschi, Leon Battista Alberti and Leonardo da Vinci spread throughout Europe, and they continue to inspire the world. In most eras we discourage polymaths, but we make an exception for Quattrocento genius.

Header photo: View from Erte Ale volcano in Ethiopia
This was a study for the performance installation ›Epiphany: The Cycle of Life.‹ (c) 2015 Ali Hossaini

Photo below: Epiphany: The Cycle of Life
Singer Netsayi and the Young People’s Chorus of New York City perform ›Epiphany: The Cycle of Life‹ at BAM in New York City. (c) 2015 Ali Hossaini

It was not a given that 15th-century Italy would invent perspectival drawing. Euclid codified optics over two thousand years ago, and some scholars argue that the ancient Greeks applied perspective to painting, architecture and theatre. As the name implies, the Renaissance was a rebirth of classical learning. But the Italians of the Quattrocento went further than the ancients, and perspective spread across Europe from Italy, and from Europe to the world. We can describe perspective in one stroke. By applying science to art, and shaping science with art, Renaissance polymaths created the flat panel display. 

The beauty of perspectival art reveals the structure of space. Our first guide to perspective is Alberti’s 1435 treatise On Painting, a slender volume which generated incalculable economic value when its techniques were applied to new disciplines. Within a century of Alberti’s treatise, inventors used the camera obscura to automate perspectival drawing, and, within decades, Louis Daguerre and William Henry Fox Talbot industrialised it by inventing photography: drawing with light. To this day, cameras are a locus of innovation, notably in mobile handsets, that charge economic growth. At the same time, the camera is a useful metaphor in digital media. Gaming and animation developers use a ‚camera tool‘ to define the user’s point of view. Today’s 3D design software is one of Alberti’s many heirs.

We can speculate on why a spatial multiverse eludes us. Is it because polymaths invented the flat panel display? Renaissance engineers were accomplished artists and scientists; indeed, it is impossible to characterise them with a single word. Their aesthetics embodied intellectual and technical rigour, and they combined innovation with humane values. Consider Brunelleschi’s architectural masterpiece, Il Duomo. Accidents commonly mar construction, but, during Brunelleschi’s management, Florence’s cathedral was erected without a death. Renaissance polymaths studied ancient texts, but they probed nature with tools of their own invention. They envisioned modern science by creating humane environments filled with beautiful objects.

Contrast the Quattrocento with today. Contemporary professionals specialise while the paragons of the Italian Renaissance embodied wide-ranging talent. Perhaps this explains their lasting influence. Drawing in perspective was not instantly popular. Now we take the medium for granted, but 15th-century audiences treated perspective as advanced technology: difficult to learn, marginalised and controversial. Perspective’s utility did not immediately show, and its power to create illusions seemed a gift from Satan. But Renaissance paintings incorporate fine aesthetics. Their masters created paradigms for the media they invented.

Let me ask again: What lessons can we take from the Renaissance? Aesthetics and contemporary ethics should drive engineering. Technology should express its time; it should express the possibilities and necessities of the moment. Consider another great polymath. In the early 19th century, the Prussian explorer Alexander von Humboldt travelled the world in a quest for grounding principles. Arguably the founder of ecology, von Humboldt published illustrated books that demonstrated interconnections among the physical world, the biological environment and human interventions. Though celebrated while alive, von Humboldt’s star faded and his holistic, interdisciplinary theories were replaced by specialisation and linear causality.

Humanity stands at a precipice, and creative industry is both problem and solution. Our ability to create artificial environments has masked disastrous mismanagement of nature. At the same time, cultural conflicts have paralysed our capacity to act. Why can’t we save ourselves and the innocent creatures who share our planet? The answer turns on the exclusionary cultures we have created—cultures which oppose the ecologically transcendent humanism of Alexander von Humboldt and other ecologists.

Let us return to spatial media. How should the multiverse evolve? Should it sever humanity from nature, or can it bind society to ecology? Should it enable monopoly, even tyranny, or provide opportunities for all? Markets will determine the multiverse’s form but so will designers. Rather than inventing for its own sake, the multiverse’s engineers need to judge outcomes. Good intentions alone are a recipe for disaster. In the 1990s, I deployed social media into television networks. My goal was to create media for a democratic society. Massive channels, controlled by a few, should be fragmented into capillaries run by individuals. Social media would—I thought—encourage critical thought, dialogue and solidarity.

Here’s another lesson from the Quattrocento. Its polymaths did not separate thinking, making and doing. Nor did they separate ethics, aesthetics and technics. Today holism is deeply unpopular, but I think it is vital for innovators to adopt it. And I argue that holism is vital for producing commercially viable forms of spatial media. The multiverse is not an end in itself: it is the foundation for future generations to innovate. My work in developing standards for ethical design of AI and brain-computer interface has convinced me that media will converge with architecture, urbanism and biology. The next-generation Internet will transcend our current conceptions. Did Alberti imagine streaming media when he wrote On Painting? Imagine the value unleashed by 21st-century infrastructure which supports decades, even centuries, of progress.

The New European Renaissance could mesh creative industry, science and engineering with an ethos of global awareness. It would preserve the cohesion of European institutions, and it would support the relevance of European industry—and the European project—in a world of superpowers. Let us invest in a 21st-century Renaissance that starts in Europe but benefits every global citizen. Europe’s institutions, the heirs of the mecenati, can generate vast new wealth, and they can also ensure the benefits of prosperity for future generations. What illuminates this path to a bright future? Humanity, technology and ecology coupled to creative imagination.

Photo left: GROUPTHINK: The Internet of Neurons
Neuroscientist Shama Rahman and computer scientist Mick Grierson collaborated with Ali Hossaini, an AI and a cohort of artist-engineers to create GROUPTHINK. Performed at National Gallery X in London and broadcast via Ars Electronica Festival 2021. (c) 2021 Ali Hossaini

Peace Prize of the German Book Trade 2021 – Acceptance Speech of Tsitsi Dangarembga, held on 24.10.2021 in Frankfurt am Main

Dear honoured guests all, I feel, standing before you here today, as I imagine Jonah must have felt when he was inside the whale.  Taken in by a great beast like a bit of plankton floating by, landing within the entrails of a massive mammal, not knowing how he will find his way out of the great churning gut, but knowing very well what the end process of being digested is and therefore, while feeling grateful at no longer being tossed in the raging sea, nevertheless also feeling highly excited.

Indeed, the award of the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade 2021 is a cause for great excitement in my life.  I did not ever imagine that one day I would stand in this lovely venue in Frankfurt, a city in a country that I conceive of as having been the strong umbilical chord of western empire, in order to receive the German Book Trade’s most distinguished prize.  Therefore, I am astonished to stand before you today.  At the same time, I am delighted, and I am humbled at this unfolding of events.   I am thankful to my publishers, Orlanda Verlag, who first published my work, and then submitted it for consideration; and I thank the jury who recognised positive value in my voice, a voice from that part of the world so often described as other and so often preceded by negative qualifiers.  There are seven billion human beings on the planet.  I am now one of the few of that great number who understands what a great privilege it is to find oneself in a place that not even imagination had been capable of transporting one to.

Various forms of violence were unleashed on black bodies as the new settler state evolved.  These forms of violence included the banning of black political parties, police brutality, judicial harassment, abduction, detention and torture.  The violence of the denial of freedom was encoded in laws that determined such things as where black bodies could be at what time, where minds embodied in black bodies could obtain education, where a black body could purchase land or farm, and what kind of alcoholic beverage could be sold to or imbibed by a black body where.

In 1965, the British settler community of the country, now called Rhodesia, declared their own independence from Great Britain.  This declaration of independence by the white population was in response to the British policy of decolonisation through negotiating independence with its colonies that evolved in the 1950s.  The new policy was an imperial response to unrest in the colonies where there was political agitation for independence through majority rule.  As majority rule in a predominantly black state meant rule by black people, the settler community of Rhodesia acted to prevent it by unilaterally declaring independence from Britain.

The formative violence of the Zimbabwean nation state is not an isolated historical occurrence.  The greater part of the world has experienced the multi-faceted violence that I have described in the Zimbabwean case at the hands of western empire.  This violence is standard for all the imperial enterprise practised by the western quarter of the world on the rest of the globe, a process that began in the fifteenth century.  In fact in some cases, such as the USA the process was even more violent with entire nations being wiped out through genocide.  We should not be surprised then that violence – physical, psychological, political, economic, metaphysical and genocidal – is too often the order of the day in postcolonial countries.  These kinds of violence are structured into the global order that we live in, and have their root in the structures of western empire that began to be formed over half a millennium ago.  This is to say that the west, with all its technology and belief systems and practices, is built on these multiple ongoing forms of violence, which it exported to the rest of the world and which are now practiced as eagerly in postcolonial states as they were by imperial and colonial states.

Our current global dispensation does invest large amounts of money into influencing group behaviour.  Methods of influencing group behaviour are taught in courses for disciplines such as marketing and business studies, politics and propaganda studies all over the world.  Such courses teach students how to define a target group by segmenting a population according to a range of demographics.  The desires of this population are then manipulated with the aim of this manipulation being not the good of the people concerned or an increase in peace, but in order to maximise something that we refer to as profit.  This may be financial, political, social or any other kind of human profit.

I put it to you that this thing we call profit does not in fact exist.  In absolute terms, the notion of profit is a fallacy.  In the dimension of the human, and the world we inhabit physically, events and matter are localised in time and space.  Value that appears in one time and place is value that has been removed from another time and place.  A system based on profit, on receiving more than is given, is a system of exploitation.  Systems of exploitation result in concentration and deficit.  A system that manufactures concentration on the one hand and deficit on the other is a system of imbalance.  Such a system is inherently unstable and therefore not sustainable.  How then have we come to invest in an unstable, unsustainable system that is bound to lead to our downfall?

Let us consider the case of a mind that is not one’s own.  Let us assume that this other mind that is not one’s own, holds a different content to the contents in one’s own mind; or that it utilises a different system of evoking and arranging contents and thus of delivering meaning; or that it differs from one’s own mind in both content and process.  Those who believe that being in the world and knowing in the world is based on „I think“, may very easily come to the conclusion that a mind that uses different contents for representing and different processes of combining contents does not think at all, and therefore does not represent an „I“ at all.

Let us now go on to assume that this mind that is not one’s own is embodied.  It is easy to see how such an embodied being that is not oneself, that does not think as oneself does, and therefore is said not to think, is very likely to evoke in one’s mind the content „They do not think, therefore they are not“.  Since the thinker of „I think therefore I am“ perceives of themself as human, those who think differently are perceived of as being not like me, or not human.  As we know, this denial of the human value of other human beings has the effect of raising the human value we ascribe to ourselves; and as we also know, this mechanism of differential attribution of humanity has been responsible for much of the violence that human beings have visited on each other.

I make this point not to discredit the Enlightenment.  It is very hard for me, someone who is not personally connected directly to the history of Europe and its narrative, to imagine what life here was like during the Dark Ages through the Middle Ages, and how deeply the thought revolution that was the Enlightenment was needed.  My point is to add my voice to those who say the Enlightenment of yester-century has run its course so that we, all of us on this planet today are in great need of a new enlightenment.