This new publication imagines a world in a new light is a super captivating book and it’s highly recommended.
“This is a book about imagination. Its focus isn’t imagination in the arts or sciences, or the imaginative worlds of fiction and poetry. Instead, it’s about how we might imagine a better society, one with less unhappiness, poverty, violence and ecological harm, as a first step to making it happen….
…today, however far into the future our imaginations stretch, we are more likely to believe that the road will be paved with disasters, cycles rather than progress, and downfalls more than improvements.
This suspicion may well be justified. However, a piece of family history makes me sceptical of such apparently rational pessimism. A cousin of mine, John Mulgan, was a well-known writer in 1930s New Zealand and author of the iconic book Man Alone, set amidst the political conflict of the Great Depression. During the Second World War, after fighting in the Battle of El Alamein, he was sent to Greece and put in charge of coordinating the resistance against the Nazis in one region. There he was awarded the Military Cross. Then, aged thirty-three, just as the war came to an end, John killed himself with a morphine overdose in Cairo, apparently disillusioned and pessimistic about the world’s prospects (partly because the British were restoring the discredited Greek monarchy). At that time, the future seemed unbearably bleak.
Yet I was brought up to see 1945 as one of the great years of hope, when much of Europe and Asia was liberated from oppression and when Britain began to create a welfare state. From this story, I therefore conclude that our personal sense of pessimism or optimism about the future will likely never be accurate….”
Geoff, Mulgan, Another World is Possible: How to Reignite Social and Political Imagination, London: Hurst & Company, 2022.