How can we start humanising the world?

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I’ve given quite a few talks and spoken with a lot of people since the publication of my book ‘Humanise: how knowing ourselves can change the world’ late in 2024. It’s been well received, and the audiences I’ve spoken to about it have found its vision of a humanised world very attractive. As result, the question that has most often come up has been ‘How can we take practical steps to move towards a more humanised world?’.

This is a question of particular relevance and urgency in the political and cultural times we live in globally, in which many aspects of the world appear to have quickly lurched in the opposite direction recommended by the book since its publication. These include the rise of populism, conflict, prejudice, environmental destruction and, overall, the dismantling of existing protective structures around human beings (such as the US pulling out of the Paris climate agreement) rather than the building of further structures to promote our flourishing.

I’ve therefore written the paper below to answer the increasingly urgent question of ‘What can each of us do to move from where the world is to a more humanised world?’. It contains 6 practical steps we can all take to start the shift towards a more humanised world – and at the moment, there doesn’t appear to be a more important issue than this.

Click here to read the paper (pdf).

 

Please also share the paper with your friends, colleagues and networks!

‘Humanise’ – new book out 25th October 2024

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I’m very excited to announce that my fourth book ‘Humanise: How knowing ourselves could change the world’ will be out on Friday 25th October 2024.

A summary of the book is here, but the core aim of the book has been to provide an accessible yet reasonably accurate picture of how human beings think and behave, and then apply this to some of our most pressing challenges as creatures. It is based on the idea that there is little chance of us building a better society or addressing our challenges as a species if we don’t understand ourselves as creatures first.

Yet, as the book reveals, this is exactly what we have been trying to do over recent decades. Most people – including policy makers and politicians – have an inaccurate or incomplete conception of how human beings think and behave, based on out-of-date thinking from the Enlightenment, and this has hampered our ability to tackle major human challenges including the obesity crisis, disinformation, prejudice, violence and climate change.

The third part of the book seeks to bring all these themes together and ask why we seem to be struggling as creatures with aspects of the modern world, including the challenges mentioned above. It argues that the modern world we have built around us actually represents a hostile environment for human beings in a number of ways, and argues that the only way to build a world in which humans can flourish is to ‘humanise’ the ideas, institutions and structures that surround us. These radical changes will help support rather than exploit some of our cognitive and behavioural vulnerabilities – from our inbuilt thinking biases to our tendency for tribalism – and help nurture some of our traits that will be more useful in our interdependent modern world, including our ‘superpower’ of co-operation.

It is a hopeful but radical book that will challenge people’s views of what they are, as well as some of our most basic ideas, institutions and assumptions – from freedom to education. I feel it provides some basic foundations that could give us the most realistic chance of building a better and more sustainable future for our species and the planet.

The book has been a huge undertaking as it is essentially 3 books in one, with each requiring a strong review of the evidence base. The first part is a psychology book, the second an analysis of 5 key human challenges and the third part a discussion of political, social and practical possibilities for the world we could build ourselves in the future. Overall, I hope it is a book that will be both interesting and stimulate future research and action on how to build a better future based on understanding the creatures we really are.

Click here to pre-order it!

Talks

I’m doing an online talk to promote the book on the 28th October 2024. It would be lovely to see you there. The link to book (free) tickets is below:

Podcast Ep 8 – How eating insects could save the world

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My conversation in episode 8 of my podcast ‘Making the world better’ – out now – is with Dr Tilly Collins. Tilly is a Senior Fellow at the Centre for Environmental Policy at Imperial College, London.

She runs research projects in a range of environmental areas, but in this episode we talk about her work on how to make global food production more sustainable, and in particular the potential value of insects as a nutritious and sustainable food source for human beings.

You may well have seen a few insect food products making their way on to the shelves of supermarkets as snacks and might have felt the idea of eating insect is a bit of a novelty, and nothing more than that. But in our conversation, Tilly explores the important role they could play in the global food system, and the role they are already playing in many countries around the world.

Tilly shows that there are loads of exciting possibilities for the future of food production that could really help to change the world for the better – not just for the environment, but also for local economies and people’s lives.

I hope you enjoy our conversation. Listen to it here.

Please subscribe to the podcast on Spotify or Apple Podcasts and share it with everyone!

Beyond words

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I’ve recently become tired of hearing people’s words – both those of others and my own. This evening I went for a walk on the hills of the South Downs as the sun set, and it reminded me of the joy of being without words.

Just standing silently and letting the sights and sounds of nature wash over me gave me the most profound feeling of peace and belonging.

As I stood there listening, breathing and looking, I realised that no words could convey the richness and complexity of the experience of just being in that natural landscape. You can only understand it if you experience it yourself.

And I realised that this act of ‘experiencing nature’ – just appreciating the experience of existing within it – is one of the great joys of my life.