Sunday 05/04/2020

This is where I end up, with earnest and urgent advocacy for a real time global celebration in 2050. Why then? because it’s time enough, and manageable from 2020. I mean, the schedule is relaxed, unlike the UN agreement to eliminate global poverty by 2030.

This agreement, cited by the UN Secretary recently as still valid, would involve massive transfer of resources between rich and poor nations. He pointed out that at this time of huge challenge to the resources of wealthy countries from the Covid 19 epidemic, a wealth transfer to poor nations will be unpopular. He nevertheless said that global eradication of the virus was the only viable option, and that the health of all of us was as fragile as the weakest member. Therefore our only hope of salvation as a species was just such a massive transfer of resources, and that it should indeed occur just now to help them upgrade their ability to fight Covid 19..

In the short to medium term, by which I mean five to 30 years, such a transfer will be necessary to avert mega death. However all these changes are overwhelming and without some kind of future vision, it will be hard to entrain our populations in such agendas. The pandemic does bring things forward as far as achieving at a stroke both general acknowledgement of the need for urgent intervention and controlling measures to facilitate human survival, and the concept of ‘lockdown’ with its demonstration of the success of the virtual world is certainly an essential tool.

Historically, and as was shown in the anthropological studies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, people lived in ‘separate silos’ of different cultural worlds and rules, but they always contained some definitions of ‘how things are’ in that universe. These shared cultural models act like ‘targets’ for behaviour and acting them out determines valid from invalid action in everyday life. The absence of them is experienced as ‘anomie’, purposelessness, depression and unstable identity crisis. However all such local ontologies are ALL inventions, in the sense of self validating models.

We desperately need another one just now. That’s where ‘the Celebration’ comes in. We need a five dimensional process model of our present predicament which could have a beneficial ‘outcome,’ and a road map just a little way beyond. Such is the ‘Celebration ‘ concept for the birth of the new world order.