Geoff's blog

Understanding the world around us

Geoff Mulgan - 07.02.2012

Are we doomed to live in a world we can't understand?  Before the modern era most people took it for granted that they were surrounded by the mysterious and capricious forces of fate and destiny. Then the enlightenment promised that we could understand our world, and for a time even things like electric lights and telephones were roughly within the cognitive grasp of the majority.

Today however the sheer complexity of many of the systems we depend on has far outstripped our capacity to understand. The growth rate of scientific journal articles is around 5.5 per cent a year, suggesting a corresponding reduction in the fraction of existing knowledge that anyone can master.  One version of the future sees us ever more alienated from our own creations - baffled observers of increasingly smart machines.  The intriguing question then is what might help us to keep up?   How do we avoid a widening cognitive deficit - with all that implies for our self-respect?

The shock of the new

The exhibition of early Soviet architecture and design at the Royal Academy is a wonderful mixture of the exhilarating and the depressing. It's exhilarating to be reminded of a group of creative people who tried to design an entirely new visual language.  It's depressing to be reminded of how the regime they wanted to serve ended up eating them, and retreating to a mediocre conservatism.   Many of the buildings have decayed, and there's now an odd poetry in the crumbling tower blocks and public buildings. But the clarity of their vision, and brilliant execution of lines and abstract shapes, is stunning. I went straight from it to see Michel Hazanavicius' The Artist, which is beautifully executed as a recreation of the silent movie at its peak, but almost too self-conscious to quite touch my heartstrings.  Even the very best pastiche can't match the passionate energy of people trying to create something entirely new.

Happiness

I was involved last year in the launch of an unusual new organisation, Action for Happiness. I've worked on making sense of new research about happiness for 15 years now. In 1995 I made Radio 4 programme on the subject which convinced me this would become much more important. I was then commissioned and helped write a report on the subject for the Cabinet Office in 2001. At the time my then boss Tony Blair was, to say the least, sceptical. But a decade on this is becoming a common sense. The Office for National Statistics is measuring wellbeing on a large scale, and although government has barely made the first step in reshaping policy, it's only a matter of time before this happens.  The idea for Action for Happiness was to provide people with practical tools they could use in their own lives - in the workplace, in schools or communities - and to bring together a coalition that now includes organisations with well over 12 million members.  The very brilliant Chief Executive Mark Williamson has done amazing things in a very short period of time, which are summarised in this review of the year.