What a year 2024 has been! News that European carbon emissions dropped 8%. Trump on his way back to the White House. Beavers spreading across the UK. Another COP in a petro-state. Genocide in Palestine. China’s carbon emissions peaking early. More extreme weather events. Nuclear war back as a talking point.
Some great news but set in a sea of increasing chaos.
Can we usefully think of this chaos as opening, or even being essential for, a new paradigm to emerge? I think so, however painful that process might be.
That paradigm shift is happening – across science, technology and culture, and in our consciousness. It manifests as a rebalancing from reductionism to holism, from rationality to intuition, from science to art, and from materialism to a sense of the sacred.
In medicine, contradicting all reductionist hopes, we now know that genes are very poor predictors of disease – only 5-10% at most, and that the expression of our genes is affected by the wider environment, culture and, ultimately, the state of the whole planet.
In biology, scientists have been confronting the limitations of seeing the natural world as separate competing individuals and are instead now applying new mathematics that enables us to understand how species organise collaboratively to create a whole living planet.
Dr Iain McGilchrist, psychiatrist, neuroscientist and philosopher, provides the neuroscience for the new paradigm – and how the two halves of our brain deal with, or attend, to the world. The left brain, dominant in our culture and tied slavishly to rationality, sees the world as made up of parts which it literally cannot put together and lacks the intuition fundamentally needed to make complex decisions. In constrast, the right brain understands context and can see the world as an indivisible interconnected whole, which is closer to the ultimate truth and which is beyond reductionist understanding.
Thus, the paradigm shift will be arts- and meditation-led, informed by science and enabled by technology. It will reconnect us to each other, our communities and the rest of nature. It will require us to make the links between renewable energy, rewilding, peace, organic agriculture, joy, circularity, social equity, community, worship and thriving local economies.
There are storms and high seas ahead. Safe harbour lies beyond. Only a reimagining will take us there. Our thoughts are with those impacted by climate change, war, genocide, and other atrocities. We must do better.
Happy sailing!
Remind us, has he taken up modelling for M&S or sailing this year?