After a long absence I’m back blogging. The absence was caused by technical problems with my website which it has taken some time to resolve but here I now am, live and eager to get back to commenting on and analysing the momentous events shaping our contemporary world. As always, I welcome comments and vigorous debate, though I hope we can avoid the vitriol, personal insults, assertions that have no empirical basis and posturing that unfortunately mar public debate today.
I hope over the coming months to look at the huge challenges that are facing humanity at this turning point in our history on this planet: clearly the two very different challenges of climate change and of artificial intelligence/robotisation are pushing human civilisation to the limit. At this very time, we are entering an era in which politics seems to be fragmenting into a new volatility and irrationality, making coherent action to address these challenges seemingly impossible. Yet, there are signs of hope – in the mobilisation of citizens after a time of widespread quiescence, in the breaking open of the iron cage of neoliberalism and elite rule that has characterised the period since the 1980s, and in the ways that climate change is forcing us to look anew at our destructive relationships with the natural world on which we depend.
So, perhaps more than every before in human history, everything is to play for and the nature of the future facing us is in our hands to shape. I will be developing my ideas around how we work to shape that future and the sort of future we can shape if we mobilise to do so. As I write a new book, drawing on the insights of Karl Polanyi addressing the need to transform market society in this era of climate change, I’ll be testing out ideas and proposing analyses of the possibilities for agency amid the structural constraints and opportunities of the present. Come on the journey with me…. Beidh mé ag feitheamh ort.