Renaissance is about hearts and minds – a change of worldview, a shift in the Zeitgeist. But how might this translate into the political and practical transformation that the world so urgently needs?
America’s and Israel’s war in Iran is of course unspeakably horrible as all wars are and for good measure, because of where it is – not tucked away in some distant jungle of which we know little – it is compromising day-to-day life and limiting prospects and generally ruining lives the whole world over.
The American-Israeli-Iranian war is also, as all wars are, a terrible diversion; and although in the midst of such suffering that may seem a somewhat academic observation — even callous — this may in the long term prove the most damaging aspect of all. For as everyone knows (except, it seems, the world’s most influential people, like Trump and Putin and Netanyahu and Musk and Bezos) all Life on Earth is now on the brink of disaster which as time passes, becomes more and more irreparable. Good things are happening of course and many outstanding and often heroic though mostly not well-known people are on the case, but the natural world continues to decline nonetheless. This matters because our fellow creatures matter; the destruction of the natural world should be seen to be a sin of cosmic proportions. Wicked, in one word. It matters to us too for the anthropocentric reason that human beings are part of the natural world and in the end our own wellbeing depends on the wellbeing of the whole. Technology insulates the more fortunate among us from that reality but not completely, and not for much longer.
Gaza and Ukraine and many other places are being laid waste for no better reason than to satisfy political ambition – which commonly boils down to the personal ambition of a few powerful people. Forest is trashed to make way for cattle and oil palms and airports and high-speed railways (which may be abandoned once the initial bonanza has run its course); rivers and seas are filled with sewage because the expense of treatment encroaches on short-term profits and executive bonuses; and so on and so on. The whole sorry mess is underpinned by insouciance and corruption, which in the end are the most erosive forces of all, and make a nonsense of the best intentions and the best-laid schemes. Thus as a matter of supreme urgency the world needs the Renaissance — metanoia and metamorphosis; the transformation of hearts and minds and of modus operandi; a global shift in the Zeitgeist.
Even in times of (relative) peace the world’s most influential people shy away from such radical thoughts. In times of war, though there is no shortage of rhetoric, plans to restore the world recede even further into the background. The present war in Iran will run its course, although the aftermath will run for ever, like the background radiation from the Big Bang. It will be fought to a standstill “whatever it takes” — and then the world, or at least those among us who give a damn, will count the cost. But whatever the outcome, whoever is deemed to be the winner, energy, time, and money will have been wasted, and the fabric of the Earth and its ecosystems will have declined by one more ratchet notch, and the chances of recovery will be even further reduced.
The Renaissance is indeed necessary and as outlined elsewhere on this website it must be led by us, People at Large, Ordinary Joes and Jos, because the world’s leaders, the powers-that-be, are not on the case; and the standard economic formulae and ideologies that are brought to bear are not up to the task, and neither is any government. We need the Renaissance, in short: the complete re-think, and radical re-structuring (as outlined in “What is and what could be” on February 18 2026). But if the endeavour is to succeed we need to prepare the ground with extreme care and to this end I feel there are still some fundamental issues to be addressed. Starting with:
Why “Renaissance” ?
The usual ways to bring about change are by Reform** or by Revolution. Reform and Revolution both have their merits but neither quite hits the spot. “Renaissance” literally means “re-birth” and is qualitatively different from both.
** I have spelt “Reform” with a capital R for emphasis. But I mean of course reform in the general sense – the attempt to bring about change and improvement by changing the rules and introducing new ways of doing things. Emphatically not am I referring to the political party of the same name which I suggest is a most regrettable diversion, and might properly be seen as a kind of psychological and social pathology.
Reform (in the general sense) can achieve and has achieved a great deal that is worthwhile. Slavery was ended, or at least was made illegal in the western world, by a series of reforms. Universal suffrage at least in some countries was brought about by reforms; and universal suffrage has in turn at least facilitated women’s liberation – which on various counts, not least by unleashing so much talent of all kinds, is good for humanity and for the world as a whole.
But reform by its nature is ad hoc: an incremental change in the law or in custom. It does not necessarily or usually get truly to the roots of the world’s problems. So it is that although slavery is now illegal in the US and Britain the attitudes that lay and lie behind it are still all too evident: the general “Right Wing” idea that some people are innately superior to others, and that those who are superior have a right to boss or otherwise override those they perceive to be inferior. Racism is one manifestation of this mindset. So too are all the other unpleasant and divisive “isms” – sexism, “classism”, and so on. All of these attitudes are with us still. All are deeply erosive.
Reform, too, is generally too slow and too dependent on circumstance. Thus the end (officially) of slavery, and universal suffrage in Britain, took decades to achieve; and, as many historians have argued, women’s suffrage would not have come about when it did were it not for World War I, which required women to do what was previously seen to be man’s work, and to show that they could do it just as well. So it was too that in Russia after World War II women largely took over the medical profession simply because most of the men had been killed. (And, some historians have asked, did the Unionists of the North in the American civil war really care about the plight of the slaves or did they intend primarily to undermine the economy of the Southern States, the Feds, who threatened to secede? But perhaps that is too cynical.)
Reforms too tend to be fragile. In Britain, or at least in the decades of two-party Britain, Labour governments have tended to reverse whatever their Conservative predecessors installed, and vice versa. In Russia Mikhail Gorbachev’s apparently world-changing shift towards democracy was reversed with all possible haste by the intervention of the American Right and the imposition of rampant neoliberalism, and the corruption that goes with it, and within a few decades has brought us Putin’s brutalist autocracy. (Putin rails against Nazism although it is hard to see in what respects his own philosophy significantly differs.)
In short: the point in the end is not simply to make bad things unlawful. If the world is truly to be secure then racism and classism and sexism and Nazism and all the other foul and destructive isms must become unthinkable.
Yet reform is much better than nothing – and in firmly entrenched autocracies worthwhile reform may be impossible. So it is that in present-day Russia or Iran even mild criticism of the status quo can lead to 15 years’ imprisonment or to some mysterious but fatal accident. When reform is made impossible there seems no alternative to Revolution; either that or endurance — and luck; for in autocracies, typically run as they are by fickle and unstable old men, no-one is safe. Even those who keep their heads down and strive to be seen as law-abiding citizens are still subject to the despot’s whim.
But revolutions rarely or never turn out the way their instigators hoped for. The revolutionaries who toppled the Tzars never envisaged three decades of Stalin. And whatever happened to the Arab Spring? Military intervention by third parties – which is revolution of a kind — is not satisfactory either, as America in particular has demonstrated these past several decades, and tragically continues to demonstrate in Iran. For as the Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana famously observed circa 1905:
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”
So how does Renaissance differ from Reform and Revolution? And why should it succeed when those time-honoured drivers of change fall short?
What’s different about Renaissance?
Reforms and Revolutions both have an ad hoc quality. Both in general are attempts to put specific shortfalls to rights. Both are driven by ideologies which are specific bodies of ideas that in the main are rooted in politics and/or religion: Marxist, neoliberal, Christian, Muslim, materialist-atheist-rationalist-logical positivist, and so on and so on. Renaissance by contrast is a hearts-and-minds thing. It is an attempt to shift attitudes; mindset; the thoughts mostly hidden in the subconscious that for whatever reason we believe, and take for granted, and live by. Renaissance in short is an attempt to shift the Zeitgeist, the elusive but all-pervasive Spirit of the Age.
Renaissance is not and cannot be driven by mere ideologies. It must be rooted in what I have been calling the Bedrock Principles of Morality and Ecology.
Morality – moral philosophy — aspires to tell us what it is right to do, which is the concern of ethical committees; and also may address the metaphysical question – what exactly is “Good” (goodness) as opposed to “Bad” (meaning wickedness, or evil)? And, as I have suggested many a time and oft, the essence of morality is encapsulated in three ideas and attitudes that are at the heart of all the major religions and a great many “indigenous belief systems”. They are the “virtues” of Compassion, Humility, and the Sense of Oneness: the Oneness of different peoples; of humanity with the rest of Life; and of Life with the Cosmos as a whole. (The concept of Oneness is spelled out wonderfully by the late Thomas Berry in The Sacred Universe.)
Ecology seeks to tell us how the living world really works; what it consists of; how many different creatures there are and how they all interact with each other and with the fabric of the planet Earth; and indeed how the Earth interacts with the rest of the solar system and with the cosmos as a whole. The subject of ecology has often been treated as an also-ran; a softer option for students of biology who weren’t considered bright enough for molecular biology and a job in biotech. That was and is a huge mistake. Ecology in practice should be seen not simply as a science but as a meta-science, which partakes of all the sciences from the wildest flights of physics to the down-to-earth realities of natural history (outlined in “Fellow Creatures”, August 16 2025). Indeed, as Thomas Aquinas said of theology, Ecology may properly be seen as the Queen of Sciences.
Ecology on the one hand is of huge practical importance. It is applied to everyday life mainly via the practices of conservation and of agroecology, which should be the agricultural norm. More generally, ecology addresses the fundamental questions of survival. What is it necessary to do to ensure that life on Earth, including human life, may flourish not just for the time being but in effect forever? And what is it possible to do, within the physical and biological limits of planet Earth? If what is necessary exceeds what is possible, we are in deep trouble. Right now, in many areas, this is already the case.
On the other hand ecology is of huge moral and spiritual – metaphysical – significance. James Lovelock recognised both aspects in his concept of Gaia, in which he pointed out the Earth as a whole behaves in crucial respects as if it had mastered the skills of homeostasis: the ability to maintain conditions that can support life even when the physical environment veers off into violent and potentially lethal extremes. Homeostasis is a prime feature of Life — so the Earth may at least by analogy be thought of as an organism. The name, Gaia, the Greek Goddess of the Earth, was suggested by Lovelock’s literary friend William Golding.
Alas, over the past few centuries, science has been seen to be an inveterately “rational” pursuit – strictly cerebral; while spirituality has been seen to be more or less purely intuitive. And although rationality and intuition are intertwined and interdependent, the two have been seen to be at odds — and science has accordingly been presented as the antithesis of spirituality. In this modern, materialist, “rational”, industrialised world science has more and more been seen as the handmaiden of high tech, and industry in general has become more and more high tech, and industry more and more has been seen primarily as the means to make money and achieve dominance. Thus the modern myth has it that as science (via high tech) increases its hold on modern life, spirituality must retreat.
But as Thomas Berry writes in chapter 10 of The Sacred Universe:
“The industrial movement, with its ideal of subjection of the planet, must now give way to the ecological movement ….
“This requires a new spirituality. We need the guidance of the prophet, the priest, the saint, the yogi, the Buddhist monk, the Chinese sage, the Greek philosopher, and the modern scientist.
“Yet for these times they might all be considered limited [for] we now have a new understanding of the universe, how it came into being and the sequence of transformations through which it has passed.
“This new story of the universe is now needed as our sacred story…. We need an ecological spirituality …”
Precisely. However:
Necessary but not sufficient
Although it is vital to change hearts and minds if we truly want to make the world a better place — kinder, more secure, and indeed more viable – that still isn’t enough. Metanoia is necessary but not sufficient. Governments and powerful individuals within governments seem able to pursue their ambitions and indulge their whims even when public opinion is against them. Thus I find it hard to believe that most “ordinary” Russians (and “ordinary” is a good thing to be) feel comfortable with Putin’s war on Ukraine. In fact it is obvious that they do not. But Putin has a stranglehold and has his way anyway.
So the question remains: how can the shift in Zeitgeist bring about a real shift in what actually happens? In short:
How can big ideas become reality?
It isn’t obvious that worthwhile change is even possible in an absolute autocracy. There has to be some semblance, some rudiment or some vestige of democracy so that alternative notions can at least be voiced and those who voice them are not made immediately to disappear.
Assuming there is at least a spark of democracy, those with alternative views can come together and form what is commonly called a “movement”. The concerted movement can then exert pressure on the government; and except in absolute autocracies in which people at large hardly dare even to breathe, governments do have to take some notice of outside voices. The question arises, of course, whether we need governments at all – and some extremely intelligent people have argued that we would be better off without, including Tolstoy no less, who in 1900 after a lifetime under the Tzars wrote in his essay On Anarchy:
“The Anarchists are right in everything; in the negation of the existing order; and in the assertion that, without Authority, there could not be worse violence than that of Authority under existing conditions”
Modern Russians under Putin (or Americans under Trump) might well be echoing this thought. In the end, though, societies bigger than a poker school almost certainly do need governments and the task for all of us in democracies is to ensure that those governments do the things that people at large want them to do and the things that improve the general weal (although, unfortunately, the things that people say they want are not always the things that would help to create a more viable world).
In practice, I suggest, in a properly functional democracy, pressure groups and the government of the day can and should operate iteratively. That is, the pressure group should spell out what’s wanted and the government should do its best to oblige — though also pointing out from its position of special knowledge what the problems are and the limitations. Assuming the government is telling the truth, the pressure group should then as they say in Yorkshire think on, and, perhaps, modify its own demands, and the government should respond accordingly – and so on. In short, a functional democracy almost certainly does need a (properly elected) government and it needs something like a citizens’ forum to engage with the government; and the people’s forum in practice should include people’s movements of the kind that I hope the proposed Renaissance Movement might become. To be sure, governments already consult various pressure groups and/or to some extent are obliged to respond to pressure groups so some would claim that Britain at least already has democracy, at least up to a considerable point.
But, I suggest, the proposed Renaissance Movement differs from all the rest precisely because it is not ad hoc. It derives directly from the bedrock principles of Ecology and Morality, both in turn rooted in ideas of a metaphysical nature – ideas that must be made explicit. Only then can the changes that are needed be properly identified and acted upon and set in firm foundations.
In short: let’s build the Renaissance Movement. The chances of success are small but the prize is very great and the price of failure is too horrible to contemplate, although the early signs are clear to see already. We owe it to ourselves and to all Life on Earth to give it our best shot.
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