A good friend asked me this in 2006:

Search your head for a world in 50 years or so time that is not a miserable mess. What's your idea of a good-as-we-could-hope-for-in-the-current-way-of-things-world would look like - I mean the best possible scenario of how things might turn out in the not so distant future. And also how possible you think it might be.

Damn fine questions. I'd not long moved to Leeds, and another good friend had given me a brilliant book to take with me, and it just so happened that I'd read the perfect thing earlier that day. So this is what I replied:

(From Alastair McIntosh's Soil and Soul)

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The human search for God, then, is the age-old search for meaning in life - to find a life worth living. And really, there's so much to be living for: such scope for massive transformation of this world if we could only pull it off.

That's why it's worth trying. That's why we shouldn't give in and lie down before the idols.

Just consider, for example, what a life-long framework for, let's say, a spiritually rich, holistic education might look like: it might start with soil structure and why the biochemistry of organic farming sustains biodiversity, and go on to look at how biodiversity equates with an optimal balance of arable crops and animal stock, and that with animal welfare and human health; with awareness of energy alternatives that would mitigate dangers of global warming and keep the old and poor from being cold...

with ecological restoration including computer modelling of new techniques and evolutionary processes; with maximising economic linkages and multipliers at bioregional, national and global levels; with business structures that harmonise enterprise with accountability and co-operation; with an economics of 'fair trade'; with ecological architecture and clean, efficient public transport systems...

with knowing the roots of artistic creativity and inspiration; with poetics and story, and learning how to listen to one another; with a participatory politics of empowerment; with awareness of the psychology of prejudice and the resolution of conflict; with a non-violent civic defence strategy and taking away the causes that give rise to war...

with cherishing human life from cradle to grave; with extending the erotic into all of life, including sexual love ; with the kids having fun and playing in treehouses; with the discovery of beauty as the touchstone of what is good...

In short, with the building of community as right relationship between soil, soul and society, powered up by the passion of the heart, steered by the reason of the head, and then applied by the skilled technique of the hand.

And remember: this is not a pipe dream. Humankind is already well on the way towards understanding most of these principles. It's just a matter of linking them up and applying them.

Selected bits from Camus' Neither Victims nor Executioners, written in 1946, which Tom picked up at the Big Green Gathering. I'll leave it unpolluted by my musings, though will probably come back to it. Its direct relevance is eerie. I also love the way each paragraph presents ideas on what to do - in a way that makes sense to the individual conscience - as well as eloquent criticism. (Oh - its all man / men, etc. Shan't be putting sic in brackets every time...)

Nice comparison from today's Grauniad; Bush's blurring of every Muslim grievance as a facet in the war on terror screams 'ideology' to me... Anyway:

Today no-one speaks any more (except those who repeat themselves) because history seems to be in the grip of blind and deaf forces which will heed neither cries of warning, nor advice, nor entreaties. The years we have just gone through have killed something in us. And that something is simply the old confidence man had in himself, which led him to believe that he could always elicit human reactions from another man if he spoke to him in the language of a common humanity. We have seen men lie, degrade, kill, deport, torture - and each time it was not possible to persuade them not to do these things because they were sure of themselves and because one cannot appeal to an abstraction - i.e. the representative of an ideology.

Mankind's long dialogue has just come to an end. And naturally a man with whom one cannot reason is a man to be feared.